Everything Wrong with Dogma

The Problem of Dogma
I've made the mistake before of calling religious people dogmatic without qualification and this has unfortunately given me the appearance of being jaded towards them. They see me as painting the faithful with a broad brush, discounting all the gentle and respectable church folk who have no intention of pushing their religious views on others.

The word dogmatism conjures up images of rude, pushy, and brash people who simply can't take in criticism or advice. We might be reminded of Westboro Baptist proponents or Muslim Jihadists, for example. We see them as being so engorged with hatred that they simply cannot be reasoned with. 

However, in reality, dogmatism isn't so much a bad attitude or a particular outlook on life. It's an approach to the truth. It's a belief we hold about ourselves on how we access or relate to the truth. It's a belief we can hold quietly or loudly, innocently or viciously.

My Definition
Dogmatism, as I use the term, refers to the belief that we can intuit or recognize the truth instinctively. It is a deep trust in oneself. It is a belief that our powers of perception are sufficient.

Where we claim to discover truth is not important. We may find truth within ourselves. We may find it in the world around us. We may also claim to find it through spiritual revelation. But the important part is, when we see it, we know it is the truth. We trust our internal truth-compass. Unless something else comes along and smacks us upside the head, we usually stick with what we've discovered.

This may sound an awful lot like merely having an opinion, but the key difference is in the amount of confidence we invest into an opinion versus a truth. We hold opinions tentatively. We recognize the gap between our perception and reality. However, dogmatism causes us to consider our perceptions as being virtually synonymous with reality. Here, we are comfortable holding on to our perceptions tightly, without concern for what alternatives might be out there.

Fundamentally, dogmatism is the state of ignoring our fallibility, ignoring the multitude of possibilities in the world, and being unmotivated to look any further as a result. We are no longer critically evaluating ourselves and seeking out new possibilities. We are satisfied, confident in our initial perception, and we are stagnant.

Shortsightedness
As I see it, this approach to the truth is the root of so much human shortsightedness, limitation, stagnation, and stubbornness. We dig a trench too soon because the ground just feels right for it. We can't accept the possibility that our fundamental values and intuitions about the world could truly be wrong. They seem so right, and that is good enough for us.

Thus, the world remains in stalemate. We can only achieve so much cooperation, compromise, and creativity because so many of us can't give up our fundamental feeling of being right. We see no need to leave our comfort zone and look around for more once we've found what we think we're looking for. Worse, some of us are engaged in trying to bring the whole world into the little trench we've dug for ourselves.

Spirituality
Bringing this back home, religion and other kinds of mysticism are often heavily fortified by dogmatism, from my perspective. Granted, this is not the case for all religion. But certainly Christianity would be a prime example of one. Aside from its blatant reliance on subjective spiritual affirmations –the weakest of all approaches to truth– it encourages members to dig their trenches deeper. It encourages more faith.

It sounds like a very pious thing to place more faith in the deity, but what believers are really being asked to do, is place more faith in themselves. That is to say, believers are encouraged to abandon concerns over their fallibility and turn a blind eye to possibility. They need to focus on being right in their view of God. If they were to consider their fallibility and consider alternative views on reality, doubt would be the result. And that's very bad for faith.

Christianity, like many other religions, encourages dogmatism. It does so under the guise of piousness and humility. "Believe more, consider other alternatives less." If this were not the case, church would be a research center, not a place where people encourage each other to hold on to a conclusion till the point of death.