Quotes About Dogma

Cruel persecution and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essense of religion, namely, its absolute claims.

Religion breeds fear. And fear kills your will.

Atheism too has become a religion, just as their brothers and sisters who are theists by hearts and minds.

Having faith is great, but beliefs are so dangerous. Some people end up selling their souls to the religions.

Si vous voulez forger un athée irréductible assommez-le de principes religieux inflexibles : ça marche à tout les coups.

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, 'Don't imagine that because we don't check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don't check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists.

It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse.

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.

There is no place in a fanatic's head where reason can enter.

estrogen is essential to the maturation and preservation of bones not only in women, as had been known, but also in men; that estrogen metabolism affects glucose metabolism and therefore the risk of diabetes; and that, contrary to dogma, estrogen is not essential to fetal survival. Fetal mice don't need it, and

Is it possible to be so blinded by your own doctrine that you would actually take human life in God's name and think you are doing Him a service?

Organized religions are just elaborate con-tricks. Take the Christian religion from which yours is an offshoot: "Obey me throughout your life, give me the product of your labour, and you will go to Paradise when you die. Disobey me and you will go to Hell and burn forever. Of course I cannot prove that this is what will actually happen – you just have to have faith." That was a good one, and it worked well enough in a society that still believed the Earth was flat.

On television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound, sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence.

Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma.

Each one of a science's successive orthodoxies appears to be the definitive truth to the disciple.

Having promulgated the dogma of original innocence, liberalism concludes that the man guilty of the crime is not the envious murderer but the victim who aroused his envy.

Austeridad, resignación, modestia, según el dogma moderno, son servidumbres ideológicas.

The word "humanity" in the mouth of a Catholic is a sign of apostasy, in the unbeliever's a sign of coming bloodbaths.

All science feeds on the convictions that it strangles.

In the bosom of the Church today, 'integralists' are those who do not understand that Christianity needs a new theology, and 'progressives' are those who do not understand that the new theology must be Christian.

Even if I believe my opinion to be true, and am highly confident about its truth, unless it is 'fully, frequently and fearlessly' discussed, I will end up holding it as a dead dogma, a formulaic and unthinking response.

Heresy though that might be.

It is a peculiar characteristic of monotheistic religions that they desire to FORCE their ONE GOOD IDEA onto others