Talk:Dogma

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Examples of dogmatic coercion

Whilst they are excellent examples, some citations would be good. Lest we be accused of making them up..... DeltaStar_{Senior Sysop}^{Speciationspeed!} 20:25, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

I tagged each example with the dogmatic group from which it originated. ListenerX^TalkerX 20:29, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

You don't have dogmas?

I don't believe that. We all live by dogmas. G.K. Chesterton said that there are two kinds of people: "those who have a dogma and know it, and those who have a dogma and don’t know it." This word is used in a pejorative sense, as if dogmatic meant rigid, unthinking, and hopelessly out of touch with the way things are nowadays. But this is not true. We all live by dogmas, but more fashionable dogmas are no longer recognized as such... --Idiot number 57 (talk) 08:11, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Nonsense. We agnostics have no beliefs at all, and anyone who would suggest otherwise is a fool.

Anyway, in what sense are you using it, and how/why should the article do so? ~ Kupochama^[1][2] 08:22, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

It's all well quoting some poignant phrase from someone who I haven't really heard of but sounds like your average douche of an author who thinks they know more than they do (which is all of them, to be fair) - but what is the basis or explanation for that assertion? Undoubtedly, it depends how widely you stretch the definition of dogma; much in the same way you can stretch the definition of religion to include atheism, but then make the definition worthless because it ends up including anything and everything. Is dogma the apparently unchanging base principles by which people live their lives or is it the specific and invariant rules handed down by a priest-like class of decision makers? If the former, then it's true that everyone is dogmatic but the word loses any useful meaning, if the latter, then no, those not following an organised faith or other established philosophical institution are not following a dogma. ^narchist 08:32, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

TL, DR --Idiot number 59 (talk) 08:42, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

This wiki is like the biggest steaming pile of leftist dogmatic bullshit I've ever seen. It's one of the things that helped convince me to (reluctantly) switch my allegiance to right wing political causes because the massive piles of far left totalitarian bullshit social justice woo on this site make me realize that there are much greater threats to human liberty than dominionists. At least dominionists will (hopefully) always be restrained by prohibitions against state religion, dogma that passes itself as secular can be enforced in society without legal prohibition. JRCHReason (talk) 09:20, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Difference between dogma, axiom and definition?

If Science has no Dogma, then what happens to the belief/axiom that "that the operation of the scientific method is the best way of knowing things about the natural universe" (found on our critiques in Not Circular Reasoning)? Can that be changed or, if it falls under definition, how do we distinguish between a dogma, an axiom and a definition? [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 04:10, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

An axiom should be something that is self-evidently true itself. The scientific method, if you strip back a lot of the window dressing, is this insane idea that to know about the universe you should actually look at the universe. That's simple enough to be self-evident, but you start deriving the more complicated aspects of the philosophy of science from, things like falsifiability and hypothesis testing, refinement, open criticism and so on. By contrast, most dogmas start a few levels higher than that because if you examine things like the first-cause/Kalam argument, the only axiomatic idea you can start with is "the universe exists", from which you can derive "the universe came into being somehow and through some process". From that, there's a massive leap to get what religious dogma actually is. Because dogmatic laws are relatively vast and complicated and, quite importantly, different for each individual religion, you could restart the universe and mankind entirely and it's highly unlikely (as in, impossible to a few trillion decimal places) that we would regrow a set of identical religions. These dogmatic beliefs are just too complex to grow axiomatically from the universe - but that one concept that we can learn about the universe by examining the universe, what we call science, would probably reappear because that's far more self-evident. ^narchist 08:05, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Ah. The problem with that particular definition is that different people see different things as "self-evident". For example, people with "religious glasses" would probably require no leap of faith to jump through the gaps, and as such an axiom would be indistinguishable from a dogma for them (unless of course you have other means of separation). [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 18:54, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Axiom means "that which can be accepted without controversy". See how basic Euclid's postulates are, for instance, as they're effectively synonymous with "definition". Except, unlike most "by definition" arguments, they have a use; e.g., we can "define" existence as the world we experience as we experience existence, which sounds circular put like that but it's as self-evident as x = x. If people disagree that it's self-evident that God exists because the world exists, then it very evidently isn't accepted without controversy, and much of it. Basically put, if there was any axiomatic properties of religion, there would be only one religion and we would accept it as uncritically as the fact that we exist and can experience a world. ^bomination 13:00, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Obviously, the concept of something being axiomatic is best defined mathematically and left as exclusive to mathematics but when it comes to qualitative assertions, "I experience, therefore I am" is a nice enough starting point. Good luck deriving dogmatic law from that! ^pathetic 13:09, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that the existence of controversies are frame dependent (As Gregory Benford put it, "Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available."). As such, either (the set of axioms) or (the set of propositions that are eligible to become axioms) are changed after you get facts. There is something wrong with such definition but I am not sure what it is. [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 23:07, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Wow, this article is bad.

This version cut out good material about Rationalism, it also included atheism, agnosticism and humanism under, "How dogma is used for control." wow, this article is bad. Good material about promises of rewards and threats pf punishments after death was removed.

I risked incurring wrath by altering it and putting some back. Proxima Centauri (talk) 11:20, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

The promblem, prox, is that they mis state what dogma is. Rationalism is not free of dogma, by the way. Trying to prove something is or is not a religion by the existance of dogma (see 'athism' here) is nonsense as many religions do not have dogma. I kept the humanism section precisly because it was well written, and explains why it does not have dogma, and how it helps. The rest clarified what dogma is, and trimed out unnecessary excess. Godot She was a venus demilo in her sister's jeans 14:22, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

The categories readded by prox really have nothing to do with dogma. Certainly, adding "cult" into the article (if it's not there) is good, but dogma is not something cults must have, cult is not definiative of dogma. same with the other cats. Secondly, most dogma in the abrahamic world view does deal with the after life, punishment and rewards. But that would not be the case in most buddhism, some hinduism, etc. Be specific. Make a section on Christian (or abrahamic) dogma, and work with those ideas within that section.Godot She was a venus demilo in her sister's jeans 19:33, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a diety

There are atheistic religions out there. "Irreligious" is the word you're looking for, and not every "irreligious" person is an atheist. I'm not, despite being irreligious. If anything, I'm an agnostic deist or Ietsist. Vee (talk) 20:04, 6 November 2022 (UTC)