Absolute conviction

Absolute conviction, whether about ourselves, about others, or about any belief, is at the root of all human evil.
~ Richard Moss, M.D.

The weight of undisputed authority

The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.
~ Paul Tillich

When belief and its securities have to be left behind

 “Almost all the spiritual traditions recognize that there is a stage in man’s development when belief—in contrast to faith—and its securities have to be left behind.”
~ Alan Watts

The confusion of faith with belief

The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence.… If this is meant, one is speaking of belief rather than of faith.… Almost all the struggles between faith and knowledge are rooted in the wrong understanding of faith as a type of knowledge which has a low degree of evidence but is supported by religious authority. One of the worst errors of theology and popular religion is to make statements which intentionally or unintentionally contradict the structure of reality. Such an attitude is an expression not of faith but of the confusion of faith with belief.
~ Paul Tillich

At that moment doubt, not belief, is the greater virtue

When identification with any idea about God sets our hearts and actions against other human beings whose conceptualizations are different from our own, at that moment doubt, not belief, is the greater virtue.
~ Richard Moss, M.D.

I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer

“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.
Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”
—FROM PRIMO LEVI : IF THIS IS A MAN (1959)

They are all presented as restatements of the true sayings

"In this way all changes of doctrine - if any - are surreptitious changes . They are all presented as restatements of the true sayings of the master, of his own words, his own meaning, his own intentions ."

New ideas are heresies

"In all or almost all civilizations we find something like religious and cosmological teaching, and in many societies we find schools. Now schools, especially primitive schools, all have, it appears, a characteristic structure and function. Far from being places of critical discussion they make it their task to impart a definite doctrine, and to preserve it, pure and unchanged. It is the task of a school to hand on the tradition, the doctrine of its founder, its first master, to the next generation, and to this end the most important thing is to keep the doctrine inviolate. A school of this kind never admits a new idea. New ideas are heresies, and lead to schisms; should a member of the school try to change the doctrine, then he is expelled as a heretic. But the heretic claims, as a rule, that his is the true doctrine of the founder. Thus not even the inventor admits that he has introduced an invention; he believes, rather, that he is returning to the true orthodoxy which has somehow been perverted."

The steady haemorrhaging of public meaning

"Meanwhile, the more religion loomed up as an alternative to the steady haemorrhaging of public meaning, the more it was driven into various ugly forms of fundamentalism. Or if not that, then into New Ageist claptrap. Spirituality, in short, became either rock-hard or soggy. The meaning-of-life question was now in the hands of the gurus and spiritual masseurs, the technologists of piped contentment, and chiropractors of the psyche. With the correct techniques, you could now be guaranteed to shed the flab of meaninglessness in as little as a month. Celebrities whose minds had been addled by adulation turned to Kabbala and Scientology. They were inspired in this by the banal misconception that spirituality must surely be something outlandish and esoteric, rather than practical and material. After all, it was the material, in the shape of private jets and hordes of minders, that they were trying (mentally, at least) to escape from."