#dogma

"There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything."

"The destiny of your soul is not predicated upon acceptance of a specific dogma that happens to be "correct."A loving God does not dole out eternal condemnation because one has selected the wrong doctrine or misinterpreted scripture. On the contrary, your endeavor to understand God and the nature of the universe is a testament to your devotion."

"Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse."(History Will Teach Us Nothing)"

"Some people live in cages with bars built from their own fears and doubts. Some people live in cages with bars built from other people's fears and doubts; their parents, their friends, their brothers and sisters, their families. Some people live in cages with bars built from the choices others made for them, the circumstances other people imposed upon them. And some people break free."

"You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle."

"In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become."

"Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart."

"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons."

"From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable."

"In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."

"To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid."

"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."

"Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble."

"The death of dogma is the birth of morality."

"There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty."