Chapter 36

 

The difference between dogma and doctrine is the difference between faith and thought.

The extent to which an ideological system is taken on faith is the extent to which it is dogmatic.

The extent to which an ideological system is by its leaders expected to be taken on faith is the extent to which it is dogma proper.

Accepting an ideological system as true yet without understanding it — without knowing it and without grasping its elaborations — is ultimately the thing that distinguishes the dogmatic from the non-dogmatic.

Principles accepted upon faith — even if they turn out to be right, yet without one’s having independently sifted through the material and considered the principles in totality — are principles dogmatically held.

Cults are among the most obvious examples of dogma-in-action, but it’s important to note that neither religion nor God nor supernaturalism are the defining features of dogma. Faith, however, is — faith in the fundamental sense, which is belief without thinking or knowing — i.e. blind belief.

Faith in the fundamental sense is not only the distinguishing characteristic of dogma. It’s synonymous with it.

“Dogma” and “blind belief” are interchangeable.

Note that dogmas need not concern only metaphysical claims, where subjects like God, angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, the heavens and so forth are by definition ephemeral and not part of the sensory world where sensory perceptual reigns supreme. Dogmas even more often concern subjects for which the evidence is readily available. The lethality of the Wuhan virus, for example, and the lethality of the genetic platforms masquerading as vaccines. People need only be willing to expend the effort — the effort of thought — and the time it takes to sift through and assess the available information.

People in positions of authority know that most people won’t bother  looking closely at claims — especially not when the majority of people around them already believe in the thing or things being claimed.

Al Gore’s fantastical fabulations in his fictional story he titled Inconvenient Truth and for some inane reason called it a documentary, which time has disclosed to be laughable, with it’s “20-plus feet sea level rises by 2020,” its “over 80 percent of earth’s glaciers melted” by 2020, and polar bears either fully extinct or on the very brink (polar bear populations are thriving and have been thriving for a lot longer than Al Gore has been making motion pictures).

Those in positions of authority know they have little to worry about.

This is why the withering of the critical faculty is the greatest danger society at all times faces.

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Any ideology, religious and non-religious alike, can become dogmatic.

In fact, one can easily argue that in terms of sheer numbers and sheer atrocities committed, the deadliest and most notorious dogmas in human history have been secular  — Marxism foremost among them all.

Mao Tse Tung alone, forget Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and all the other Marxist despots, is responsible for the deaths of some 40 to 80 million human beings.

Chairman Mao thus holds the Guiness Book of World Records as the greatest mass murderer in human history.

Please note also that the thing which distinguishes the dogmatic from the non-dogmatic isn’t primarily soundness versus unsoundness or truth versus falsehood, but the level of independent examination which any one person devotes to the philosophy, ideology, or ideological system in question.

In this way, the question is purely a question of the individual’s actual grasp of the details and their elaborations, their genuine understanding of the totality.

A system of beliefs, whether true or false, solidifies into actual dogma when adherents accept it upon faith and, most significantly of all, when taking it upon faith is expected or even demanded by those in positions of power and leadership.

Dogma exists along a continuum of degrees. It’s for this reason possible to be “somewhat dogmatic,” as it’s also possible to be “mostly dogmatic,” as it is also possible to be “thoroughly dogmatic,” as it is also possible at all other points in between.

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons,” wrote Anaïs Nin, sagely, and her words, in my opinion, capture the essence of dogma.

“You are rather dogmatic in your espousal of atheism, Mr. Shermer,” I once heard a radio caller say to Michael Shermer, a self-styled man-of-science, a “new atheist,” and also the founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

Nothing this caller said is contradictory, unsound, or lexically problematic in any way.

Atheism not only can become a dogma: it has become one.

Atheism devolved into fully fledged dogma — and one of the most mindless and political sort — specifically when it began existing under its “new atheism” banner and flag.

Thus the so-called new-atheist movement devolved into a deeper dogmatism than it had in my lifetime, and in so doing it imploded.

New atheism imploded in no small measure because of its dogmatic politico-economic philosophy, which new atheism came to adopt as parcel and part of their package. This politico-economic philosophy consists of nothing more than the garden-variety progressive-liberal ideology of the day — i.e. Neo-Marxism — such as: instant dismissal and hatred of anyone it perceives as “on the right,” as well as a deep advocacy of state-forced altruism and compulsory egalitarianism.

I note here as well that I myself am atheist.

I note also that none of the self-described New Atheists I’ve ever heard or read have ever made the full and fundamental case for atheism, though a couple of them have danced around it a few times.

The case I’m referring to is this: atheism isn’t metaphysical or ethical but epistemological.

God, like Grendel and little green men, is an arbitrary claim. Arbitrary claims are baseless claims. Baseless claims are inadmissible.

Many atheists will argue that atheism provides its own protection against dogma. Atheism, they’ll say, is on principle opposed to faith and therefore any attempt to take atheistic principles on faith cannot be done.

I agree that atheism doesn’t require faith — and I often hear believers incorrectly charge that atheism is just another sort of faith. It doesn’t follow from this, though, that atheism cannot devolve into faith.

Atheism doesn’t provide its own protection against dogma, inasmuch as any system of beliefs, even scientific, must undergo deep scrutiny, which means that proponents and adherents must individually put forth the intellectual effort required to critically examine and ultimately grasp the issue or system.

If and as far as this isn’t done while yet proclaiming the truth of the doctrine, it is dogmatic.

A system of beliefs, whether accurate or inaccurate, becomes dogma proper when the preponderance of proponents do what I’ve just described — and, even more, when the official leaders and spokespeople for it replace reasoning with militancy and any kind of decrees from authority: things expected of a person to either accept or obey — or the person is heretical.

A real-life example of this played out at the exact same time, across the entire world, when the Wuhan virus emerged and a pandemic was declared.

Consider the sheer number of things the world was told and expected to believe — and did believe — without any hard evidence and in many cases without access to hard evidence.

Consider the sheer amount of destruction and unprecedented illegal action that was enacted purely on the basis of bureaucratic claims without a shred of hard data or evidence — or, in many cases, with mountains of hard data and evidence that said the diametric opposite of bureaucratic claims: for instance, the actual lethality of the virus, which was all along between 0.3 and 0.7 percent (i.e the same as the seasonal flu of 2018), but which the world for over a year was told by every major medical establishment in the world, including the CDC and the WHO was (and I quote their words verbatim)  “3 to 5 percent fatality rates.”

Yes, that happened. We heard and saw it firsthand. We lived it.

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I regard the subject of dogma as complex.

The defining characteristic of dogma is, I repeat, the extent to which the belief-system is mindlessly propounded, with blind adherence demanded, and then with blind adherence is accepted.

It almost goes without saying here that not all atheists are dogmatists – just as not all Marxists are dogmatists, just as not all religious people are dogmatists.

Some of the most learned and genuinely smart and well-educated people to whom I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking are religious — one, a Catholic priest named Father Schmidt, was a doctor of philosophy, theology, and psychology. He was also a calm and exceptionally erudite man, with a scintillating sense of humor, witty, laid-back, an occasional drinker at a bar I once tended, and definitely no dogmatist was he. He was the opposite: a man who thought and rethought — slowly, scrupulously, patiently — and he and our conversations meant a great deal to me.

The following will insulate your mind against the corrosive influence of dogmatism and the dogmatic mindset, provided the statement itself doesn’t become a dogma in your mind:

Thinking is rethinking.

This issue can be no better illustrated than in that fact.

If, for instance, any self-described progressive liberal-democrat (among the more dogmatic of people with whom I regularly come in contact now, which is why I single them out here for illustrative purposes) were to somehow entirely divest herself of partisan political dogma, even for a brief period of time, and replace it with a sincere and deep examination of any number of economic claims made by garden-variety conservatives, with whom I do not align myself — e.g. how price controls create shortages, or how minimum wage laws create greater unemployment among the most impoverished sectors of society — this same self-described progressive-liberal-democrat, if sincere in her critical examination, would indeed see that many of these mainstream conservative economic claims are undeniably accurate.

Militant atheists too. Invariably among the most intolerant of all dogmatists I routinely come across, some of them have even gone so far as to say that Newton, Galileo, and Gregor Mendel, all three of whom believed in God, are “lesser” than, for instance, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both of whom are atheists!

My incredulity here has nothing to do with Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt or anything I might have against them. In fact, I have nothing against either one of them.

The error here in such pronouncements is in placing all or even most moral merit upon the notion that disbelief in God is the fundamental virtue.

It is not.

There’s vastly more to human virtue and human life than belief or disbelief in God.

Billions of excellent people — people of the highest moral rectitude and people of the coolest sort — believe in God.

Let us never forget also that caritas maketh up for the multitude of wrongs, because caritas, like benevolence, like kindness, like hospitality and goodness itself, is unlike atheism a virtue: gentle, patient, caring, kind, generous, compassionate, and, also like goodness itself, timeless.

Goodness is timeless.

Think of dogma like this:

It’s a system of beliefs arranged and organized and placed into a bundle, which is made of wet clay. In accepting the bundle, one accepts as well, by necessity — by virtue of what dogma is — everyone of the items packaged inside the bundle, and those items, too, are each made of wet clay. Often it happens that in the course of unpackaging the bundle to scrutinize what all it contains, one finds a number of unexpected items inside – items not necessarily loved or even liked. And yet these items are a part of the total package. The longer you keep the bundle as your own, the more the wet clay hardens — until, eventually, this clay is no longer wet or damp at all but now completely solidified. It has hardened into dogma.

Dogma hardened past a certain point is impossible to re-soften or remove — not without tearing out a large section of the person to whom the bundle is attached.

Once the bundle has completely hardened, the holder of it will never be able to willing detach from it.

Dogma is in this way the deadliest thing known to humankind.

The subject of dogma is rooted exclusively in philosophy. It underscores the fact that philosophy — true, actual philosophy, as distinguished from academic philosophy which is nothing more than endless lexical hairsplitting and bears no resemblance whatsoever to actual philosophy — is a fundamental human need: the most fundamental human need there is.

It’s simple to, for example, refer to oneself as an “environmentalist.” Yet there are a million or more ideas and assumptions subsumed under and bundled within the package of “environmentalist,” which is a simple-to-say ideological title or label: vast sequence-chains and theories, complicated interpretations of data, much of which is incomplete and incompletely gathered — so much so, in fact, that one is very hard-pressed indeed to meet any self-described environmentalist who’s actually investigated seriously the innumerable claims undergirding and composing environmentalism. And yet who among us would want to come out as anti-environmentalism?

The same could be said about many other isms — and this doesn’t even touch upon the subject of all the divisions and disagreements and subdivisions within any of the isms, nor the sects and sub-sects and interminable schisms, which in turn spawn more dogmas, which in turn spawn more isms.

Neither does it touch upon the deliberate prevarications and misrepresentations — the propagandistic “over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is,” as Albert Gore so famously expressed it, “as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are.”

Close quote.

Albert Gore and all the others know very well that the overwhelming majority of people who hear such “over-representations of factual presentation” are going to believe these dogmas in full, as gospel, and not even consider the possibility that they’re “over-representations” of fact. They’ll accept them without qualm or questions asked, no independent thought given, no so much as a glance into the actual fact being “over-represented,” all of which is pure dogmatism — dogmatism unadulterated — which is precisely what Gore and others like him want: no scrutiny, no questions asked. He knows also that these same people will then make it their life mission to convert the rest of the world to their apocalyptic vision, with the four horseman from the lefthand wing flying in and trumpeting their ideological dogmas. I’m here to tell you that this is no small thing.

I speak from personal experience when I say that a person can spend his entire life combatting such dogmas.

I’ve written at some length about dogma here because it’s a subject I’ve thought about all my life, beginning as early as age four — and I still think a great deal about it — perhaps now more than ever before. The subject is endless, intricate, labyrinthian.

“Rejoice not in injustice, but rejoice in the truth,” I believe it says somewhere in the first Corinthian. I’ve always liked this. In a significant way, it strikes at the heart of the subject-matter of independent thinking as an art.

It strikes at the heart of it because dogma as I’ve come to understand it and as I’ve just defined it here is the diametric antithesis of independent thought — its polar opposite and nemesis.

Independent thought is critical thought. They’re interchangeable.

Both are the critical examination of ideas, ideologies, philosophies, propositions, and claims, almost as a way of life.

Dogma, I repeat, is the most dangerous thing known to humankind — because it’s an attempt to circumvent the process of thinking, to shortcut the effort that thought requires. For humans, thought is life. Dogma erects barriers that stand in the way of independent thought, stumbling-blocks along the road of inquiry, which is healthy and by its nature and independent activity. Dogma in this way creates division and strife.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is another current case in point. This is not a statement of race but a statement of fact. CRT is most definitely dogma. The CRT acronym alone gives it away. Why do I say?

Because jargon and dogma go together like white wine and fish.

Yes, Critical Race Theory and its handmaiden #BlackLivesMatter are both dogmas. You may have my blood in a dish.

Environmentalism, for reasons just described, is not just a dogma but a dogma of the most gigantic sort. It’s dogma piled on top of dogma piled on over a century of Marxist dogmatism. That is environmentalism.

Thus climate change, an offshoot ism, is dogma insofar as the term “climate change” is so sloppy and imprecise as to be meaningless since climate is non-static by definition. Sloppy terminology, incidentally, like acronyms, is also a dead giveaway — always and infallibly a foolproof sign of dogmatic supposition and presupposition. I know of no serious scientist or human being who doesn’t understand that climate is non-static by definition — which is to say, climate by definition changes by the second, every single moment of every single day of every single year. If it didn’t, it would be climate. And yet how many wield the term “climate change” as though it were holy writ, propounding it with blind passion, sanctimony, zeal, often genuinely moved, genuine worked up, pledging life and limb in the name of it — in short, how hold “climate change” with a dogmatic fervor and force? How many does the terminology alone make feel genuinely moved? Meanwhile, there has never, in all of recorded history, been fewer climate-related deaths than in the last decade, of course. This can be easily shown, and is easily proved.

No discussion of dogma would be complete if I were to only give brief mention to the subject which was the hook that yanked my brain painfully enough to provoke this book. I’m talking about the ideology and total worldview that’s sprung up around SARS-CoV2 — complete with its own jargon-rich lingo, its own acronym-set, its own nomenclature, all of which became dogma in a shorter span of time than anything I or you has ever witnessed — ever.

I’m prepared to prove this too.

With all due deference, reader, I ask you to at minimum hear the following at least:

Independent thought is true thought. It’s distinguished from bundles of hardening clay beliefs, which come complete with their own nomenclature. Independent thought is a uniquely human faculty — unique human beast. It’s the only antidote to dogma of every type, because independent thinking is investigative by definition, as true thought is inquisitive by its very nature.