Rigid Beliefs Quotes

I think to put someone in a box is somewhat narrow-minded.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

So much about religion has to do with rigid, sacrosanct preciousness. I don't live my life that way, and I don't feel that's what Baha'u'llah teaches.

I was raised as a Catholic. I went to a Jesuit school - obviously, being from Ireland, was brought up in quite a regimented belief structure. I shed a lot of that rigidity and got a sense that there are definitely forces that we don't understand. I think 'magic.' It's a word to apply to some of those things.

It is in the uncomprisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma that the danger lies.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.

God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of 'spiritual' truth.

The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

I came from the most orthodox background you could ask for.

Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others.

Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.

No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, 'This is our best thought, go on, think farther!' then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five.

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

We are set in our ways, bound by our perspectives and stuck in our thinking.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance ... or change. Once such incantatory phrases as "we see now through a glass darkly" and "mysterious are the ways". He chooses His wonders to perform" are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window". Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world's vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it's all on purpose.

A mistake made by many people with great convictions is that they will let nothing stand in the way of their views, not even kindness.

Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.