Dogma Page

To accept dogma is to offload the burden of thinking. It is mentally efficient. Instead of analyzing every new piece of information from scratch, a dogmatic individual filters it through a

Not carved in stone, not whispered by prophets, but printed on cheap, laminated cardstock and tucked into the breast pocket of every acolyte of the Order of the Unfurled Truth. It was called the Compendium of Small Correctnesses , and it was, by all accounts, a masterpiece of misery. To accept dogma is to offload the burden of thinking

: This is perhaps the most famous scientific use of the term. Originally, it described a one-way flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to protein. It was called the Compendium of Small Correctnesses

: The camera must be handheld. No special lighting or optical effects are allowed. : The camera must be handheld

So, where does this leave the thoughtful person in the 21st century? We cannot escape dogma—our brains are pattern-seeking, loyalty-demanding organs. Yet we have seen the horror of unbreakable certainty.

The 20th century was a graveyard of dogmatic secularism. Leninism was a dogma: the "vanguard of the proletariat," the inevitability of revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat. To question these dogmas was not reform—it was "counter-revolutionary deviation," punishable by the Gulag. Nazism, too, was a brutal dogma of racial purity and living space. These ideologies wore the robes of science or history, but functioned exactly like theological heresy trials.

To accept dogma is to offload the burden of thinking. It is mentally efficient. Instead of analyzing every new piece of information from scratch, a dogmatic individual filters it through a

Not carved in stone, not whispered by prophets, but printed on cheap, laminated cardstock and tucked into the breast pocket of every acolyte of the Order of the Unfurled Truth. It was called the Compendium of Small Correctnesses , and it was, by all accounts, a masterpiece of misery.

: This is perhaps the most famous scientific use of the term. Originally, it described a one-way flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to protein.

: The camera must be handheld. No special lighting or optical effects are allowed.

So, where does this leave the thoughtful person in the 21st century? We cannot escape dogma—our brains are pattern-seeking, loyalty-demanding organs. Yet we have seen the horror of unbreakable certainty.

The 20th century was a graveyard of dogmatic secularism. Leninism was a dogma: the "vanguard of the proletariat," the inevitability of revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat. To question these dogmas was not reform—it was "counter-revolutionary deviation," punishable by the Gulag. Nazism, too, was a brutal dogma of racial purity and living space. These ideologies wore the robes of science or history, but functioned exactly like theological heresy trials.