That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for...

If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you...

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

Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved...

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...

I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things ‘on principle,’ as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some...

I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through...

As time goes on, new and remoter aspects of truth are discovered which can seldom be fitted into creeds that are changeless.

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 theologians dead, knew no more than the theologians now living. More than this cannot be said. About this world little is known,—about another world, nothing.Our fathers were intellectual serfs, and their fathers were slaves....

There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology...

The bare knowledge of God’s will is inefficacious, it doth not better the heart. Knowledge alone is like a winter sun, which hath no heat or influence; it doth not warm the affections, or purify...

Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Fanatics are like debris following the course of the wind, they are swept around like sand, and convinced to believe in what they do not understand.

The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.

Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.

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

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

These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.

I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause – but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it’s a political...

There is no dogma that the organ or harmonium can be used in church, but not the drum.

Nobody wants to know how you feel, yet, they want you to do what they feel.

Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and...

The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish...

know” absolutely nothing—accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives. And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual...

We are slaves whose masters are dead. For we are mostly controlled by doctrines which were established centuries heretofore.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

This doctrine of forgiveness of sin is a premium on crime. ‘Forgive us our sins’ means “Let us continue in our iniquity.” It is one of the most pernicious of doctrines, and one of the...

The evidence never seemed to matter to those in power, who had already made up their minds and did what people typically do when their worldview is threatened by new data: they attacked the messenger.

Some people spend their entire lives devoted to a religion that claims to be the ‘right’ religion… they often deny scientific evidence that contradicts their archaic holy books, they sometimes oppress those who disagree with...

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.]

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

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

Mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable,...

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

I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma....

An Ego Mind is a destructive mind and a rational mind is a peaceful mind.

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...

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, “My current model” — or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel — “contains the whole universe and will never need to be...

The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine

Dogma is a defence against the brain’s capacity for free thought based on the fear that such thought might lead to a scary place.

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the...

We are all tricked. We think that religion tells us what to believe; but it doesn’t, it is telling us what not to believe. Atheism is not the absence of religion; atheism is the most...

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body,...

While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area...

While you were busy trying to prove God stands behind you, God was before me lighting the trail, so he could lead us both.