Dogma Kills! “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Commencement address by Steve Jobs at Stanford, June 2005: Dogma, as defined in Webster‘s New Collegiate Dictionary is something held as an established opinion; esp.: a definite authoritative tenet. Most agree with this definition. Dogmas can be legal, religious, political, medical, economic, organizational and so on. Throughout history, dogma (mostly devoid of logic and reason) is responsible for the slaughter of more human beings than any other cause. Authority figures (priests, rulers, judges, military figures, etc.) fill people with unresolved emotional pain. These manifest as fear and feelings of shame and inferiority. They teach them dogma mandating allegiance to this “opinion,” then punishing, even executing those who disbelieve or disobey. This dogmatic terror, this palpable evil, is nonetheless the means by which governments, churches and other organizations riddle people with fear. This could be a host of fears: fear of damnation, fear of revenge or retaliation, fear of social or ecclesiastical excommunication, etc. Why do our “leaders” try to fill sweet, tender human beings with fear? They do this to retain their own power and prestige, for their own vested interests. In the middle ages, millions of women were executed as “witches” by the political and religious leaders because they spoke with animals and used plants to cure. The genocide of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and hundreds of other maniacal rulers are testimonies to the innate evil of dogma. We could go on and on with references to the force that dogma exerts on our daily lives. We would be well advised to consider all dogmatic influences in our life situations. Where they are felt to be suffocating to our spirit, we should ignore or resist them. “There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest within your soul, and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.” Ralph Waldo Emerson