One of the problems with being dogmatic is if you are wrong. Apart from being like a dog and his bone, the dogmatist refuses to acknowledge and blinkers his eyes to any alternative view. This tendency of humans to think they are right is known as confirmation bias.
Good science eschews confirmation bias and yet how often, when processing a data set in the course of my work or teaching, have I been tempted to exclude a datum because it disagreed with my preconceptions.
My father was dogmatic in his views on eschatology - I cannot even recall what his views were, but he got angry when I suggested things might be different to what he believed. There were a couple of very dogmatic Calvinists I knew in college days and it was futile to disagree with them. I have even been known to be dogmatic myself!
A good deal of dogmatism is expressed in the young earth / intelligent design / Darwinian evolution debate. Whichever side you tend towards you probably hate the arrogance shown by some of the proponents.
Would you be prepared to die for your faith? Personally I think 'faith' is the wrong object - rather, that you should die for your friends? Stories that have this theme are the gut wrenching / tear jerking ones. One step further - the One who died for the sake of his enemies. Would you call him dogmatic? For he insisted that he was the son of God. And there's the rub, like I said in my recent post I have been taught to "hear God and obey" - but to an onlooker who disagrees with my stance I could well come across as being dogmatic.
The link I started this post with suggests that open mindedness is the antidote to dogmatism and I am inclined to agree, except that if you open your mind too wide you invite all manner of nonsense in. That's where discernment comes in handy. But discernment is a dynamically adjusted filter and has to be developed and thus can be mislead. And so people end up believing weird things.
No comments:
Post a Comment