Tom Facchine – Is Dogma Bad

			Something we've said many times and needs to be needs to be restated a lot is that people are
reacting to their experience with Christianity. I'm talking about Western culture, okay, Western
civilization, if there is such a thing, people responding to their historical experience with
Christianity, and so you have a certain group of people that are anti dogma, right? They're against
dogma, and there's a whole package, there's anti clericalism, there's an entire sort of this and
that, but one of the big things is that we don't like dogma dogma makes us feel uncomfortable that
rubs us the wrong way. So talking about well, you know, we use dogmatic as a slur. You know, as a
		

			pejorative, we say that, Oh, so and so, so dogmatic. That means it's like, Oh, my God, it's like,
they're, they're so bad. You know, they're just unthinking, and all these sorts of associations and
sensibilities. dogmatic is a descriptive term. I mean, it's not something that's inherently good or
bad. It's only the experience of, of European Christianity that has made it into something bad. So I
think as Muslims, we need to push back on these sorts of associations by, you know, illustrating to
people that it's not dogma that is wrong, or having dogma in the first place. And dogma is simply a
doctrine that is officially recognized, right? It's a teaching literally, like a doctrine is
		

			literally a teaching and a dogma is an officially recognized teaching. Right? There's nothing wrong
with having officially recognized teachings like having orthodoxy. What they have become allergic to
right is the violence and the political violence and the intolerance and the aggression that was
packed into and associated with those dogmatic teachings, right? The inquisitions, the burnings at
the state, you know, all these sorts of crazy things that happened in European Christianity, that
didn't happen in this lab or in Muslim history, right. So you don't throw the baby out with the
bathwater, as they say, right. And a lot of Western responses to these things are exactly that it's
		

			an overcorrect or an overcorrection or an overreaction to these sorts of things. So yeah, we need to
push back. We said, Listen, everybody has dogma, everybody has doctrine. I don't if you're if
you're, you know, a queer theorist, if you're a liberal, if you're progressive, if you're whatever
you have your own sort of principles. Love is Love is not a principle is not a dogma, right? Of
course it is, right. And so it's not that dogma is a bad thing, okay? But it's everything that's
associated with that. And we need to start having more honest and specific conversations about okay,
which dogmas are good and which dogmas or not or when is dogma weaponized and politicized in a
		

			certain way that it becomes problematic these things that you know, are actually intelligent
conversations instead of just being like oh my god, dogma that's so bad. Islam is so dogmatic Well,
chances are whatever you believe is at least as dogmatic as it's not