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It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
Sep 10, 2025
The crisis of the church is not at its deepest level a crisis of authority, or a crisis of dogmatic theology. It is a crisis of powerlessness in which our sole recourse is to call on the help and inward power of the Holy Spirit.
When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God's throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.
When you're overwhelmed by your emotion, you listen less and you judge more. This is also the reality of the dogmatic mind.
The faithful believe that certain truths have been 'revealed.' The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.
I do understand the free market, having my economics degree, and if someone on the right had some good ideas, I'm not so dogmatic that I wouldn't listen to them.
I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is. That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic. But you've got to say it's about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.
To have a moral sense is not to be dogmatic in dealing with rules. It can be an open way with dealing with questions of objectives and purpose, which is completely different.
However, we need to participate and manage skillfully, helpfully, and harmoniously, for a better world, family and society to be possible. So everybody's spiritual by nature I believe, not that they necessarily have to be religious. Everybody wants, or cares about, and has values even if they don't talk about them all the time explicitly, like some noisy preachers do with their foghorn voices and dogmatic views.
Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small; yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence.
Those who refuse the long drudgery of thought, and think with the heart rather than the head, are ever the most fiercely dogmatic in tone.
...More than almost any current book, DTU will wake the reader from his dogmatic slumbers. It is eminently readable, challenging, and provocative.
A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.
I sometimes find the vegetarians are more conditioned and more dogmatic than anything else, more than the religion. It's terrible, you must chew the food I don't know how many times, this you mustn't eat and this you must do, goodness me!
I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous.
The attitude of the Church was not as dogmatic as is often assumed. Interpretations of Bible passages had been revised in the light of scientific research before. Everyone regarded the earth as spherical and as freely floating in space though the Bible tells a different story.
When the author has no idea of what to reply to a critic, he then likes to say: you could not do it better anyway. This is the same as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system.
The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.
Tantra is non-dogmatic, in the sense that we don't care about the sensual world; we don't care about other religious traditions. To not care doesn't mean that we don't learn.
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.
Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.
Everybody feels like an outcast because the world is so large and every fingerprint is so vastly different from one another, and yet we have these standards and beliefs, and dogmatic systems of judgment and ranking, in almost all the societies of the world.
American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.
Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature... Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an after-world. Never was a child made more noble and good by the fear of a hell.
Tradition itself, in times of dogmatism and dogmatic revolution, is a revolutionary force which must be safeguarded.
A lot of people tend to think I'm a dogmatic ideologue, which I'm not.
Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature
I do not purpose to discuss faith in its dogmatic sense today.
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea; changing a belief is trickier.
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
Jesus no doubt fits his teaching into the late-Jewish messianic dogma. But he does not think dogmatically. He formulates no doctrine. He is far from judging any man's belief by reference to any standard of dogmatic correctness. Nowhere does he demand of his hearers that they shall sacrifice thinking to believing.
Of course, intersectionality theory is a confused muddle. It fights racism and sexism by classifying everyone according to race and sex. It views race and gender privilege as the root of all evil, while ignoring the role played by dogmatic ideologies held by all genders. And it is unfalsifiable - to its adherents, criticism and rejection of the theory actually demonstrate its truth, by showing how deeply we all have internalized our oppression.
There are many paths to enlightenment. Some of us who have expanded to a degree of illumination have thereafter preached the dogmatic certainty of one particular path. But enlightenment doesn't care how you get there. And if you aren't going to be thinking about it in paradise, then don't worry about it now.
I just think it's ridiculous to be dogmatic and be caught in the past. You have to be open, aware, nimble and flexible about changes in the world.
The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth. I'm not contending in a dogmatic way that there is not a God. What I'm contending is that we don't know that there is. I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.
Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.
The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.
There are two things you need if you are to uncover and communicate what is really happening in the world. One is to free of any dogmatic belief system. The second is not to give a damn what people think and say about you, or, at least, not to let that influence your decisions.
Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.
If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a "barbarous relic," one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution. Then the fact that the British speak English - and not Danish, German, or French - is a barbarous relic too, and every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox than those who do not wax rapturous about the plans for a managed currency.
If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.
We live in a world where it has become politically correct to avoid absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the straight and narrow glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!
Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time.
The mind God is looking for in man is a doubting, questioning mind, not a dogmatic mind; dogmatic reasoning is wrong reasoning. Dogmatic reason ties a huge rock to a man's foot and stops him forever from advancing.
On the conservative side, today's libertarianism is far more dogmatic and devoid of qualification than the liberalism of Adam Smith or J.S. Mill. Like Marxism, libertarianism is a utopian worldview based on an economic-determinist vision of history. Unlike Marxism, libertarianism is highly specific in its predictions about the transition to the utopian world order, rendering it vulnerable to fact.
If this "critical openminded attitude" ... is wanted, the question at once arises, Is it science that should be studied in order to achieve it? Why not study law? A judge has to do everything that a scientist is exhorted to do in the way of withholding judgment until all the facts are in, and then judging impartially on the merits of the case as well as he can. ... Why not a course in Sherlock Holmes? The detectives, or at least the detective-story writers, join with the scientists in excoriating "dogmatic prejudice, lying, falsification of facts, and data, and willful fallacious reasoning."
All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.
When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
The ability to change one's mind is probably a key characteristic of the successful investor. Dogmatic and rigid personalities rarely, if ever, succeed in the markets. The markets are a dynamic process, and sustained investment success requires the ability to modify and even change strategies as markets evolve.