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Religion has got so horribly mixed up with other things, with respectability, social order, conventions, doctrines, metaphysics, ceremony, music it has become so specialised in the hands of priests who have a great institution to support, that dust is thrown in people's eyes and just as they begin to think they perceive the secret, they are surrounded by tiresome dogmatists saying, 'It is this and that it is this doctrine, that tradition. Well, that sort of religion IS a very special accomplishment ecclesiastical religion.
The unravelling of the course and teachings of these sects has long been a pre-occupation of professed medical historians, but the general reader can hardly take an interest in differences between the Dogmatists, Empirics, and Methodists whose doctrines are as dead as themselves.
Success falls to the blusterers, to the imperturbable dogmatists, from whom anything is accepted if only they make a little noise. Let us discard this bad habit and admit that really, if we go to the bottom of things, we know nothing about anything. Scientifically speaking, nature is a riddle to which human curiosity finds no definite solution.
I'm thinking of Alexander." Halloway reflectively knocked the nub of ash from his pipe, and went on more slowly. "Civilization stifles me," he said seriously. "But when I turn my back on its dusty theologues and dogmatists, I still hold tight to the poets. To me feeling means much, but cold thought is like a fireless hearth." The speaker was standing before the frame of the dark window.
We might continue the enumeration and always show to the Christian church-historian or theologian old acquaintances in Moslim garb. That is why Maracci and Reland could understand Jews and Christians yielding to the temptation of joining Islam, and that also explains why Catholic and Protestant dogmatists could accuse each other of Crypto-mohammedanism.
To one who closely studies the history of humanity, evolution in religion is a certainty. Eddies there are, counter-currents of passion, fanaticism, greed, hate, pride, folly, the unreason of mobs, the strife of parties, the dreams of mystics, the logic of dogmatists, and the lust for power of ecclesiastics, but the great main tide is unmistakable.
He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood.
Unfortunately, Christians were, by their training, dogmatists and sought to silence the rising whispers of doubt by persecution, rather than by frank appeal to fact and reason. Because of this attitude, there developed the tradition of antagonism between science and religion which is so often referred to.
But my main point, at present, is to notice that the chief among these writers I have discussed do most sanely and courageously offer themselves as dogmatists, as founders of a system. It may be true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to me, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is wrong. But it is equally true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to himself, is the fact that Mr.
I cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary, if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for the dear people whom we love best, noble men, pure and lovely women, ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting, woman-strangling dogmatists.
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