Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about th...e ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit.... An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture of a house founded on the sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There has been and always will be plenty of arguments about the usefulness and harm of the spreading of the Bible. In my view the ...Bible will continue to cause harm when used in a dogmatic and fantastic manner; it will do good when used for didactic purposes and with sensitivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and of...ten a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The churches ... have lost much of their authority over youth because they have refused to re-examine their religious sanctions an...d their dogmatic preaching in the light of modern physiology, psychology and sociology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 sam...e as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it tha...n the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »