Word: dogma
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Such movements, wrote Historian Norman Cohn, strive to endow "social conflicts and aspirations with a transcendental significance - in fact with all the mystery and majesty of the final, eschatological drama." To be human is to live inside history, to accept a reality that does not respond to dogma or a megalomaniac's discipline. One escape is that found by the people in Jonestown. - Lance Morrow
...banter, they say. But these scholars are gifted with a unique body of knowledge and concomitant respect. Consequently, they must bear the responsibilities inherent in possessing this unique quality. If they do not wish to aid the goals of the Unification Church as stated in Moon's dubious dogma, they should boycott the church's cultural activities...
Silberman goes on to puncture the rightist dogma of severe punishment and electrocution enthusiasm. Certainty of punishment, not severity, deters crime; overcrowded, bestially violent American prisons pile punishment on to no recognizable end, and the animals they create of men make prison government impossible. "The fatal flaw in the traditional approach to prison government," Silberman writes, "is that by expecting the worst, it succeeds in bringing out the worst." Prison government might proceed more efficiently and humanely, indeed more constitutionally, by treating inmates like citizens in a community...
...long been liberal dogma that to eliminate crime, society must eliminate the causes: poverty and racial inequality. But even as the U.S. was pouring billions into social welfare programs, and systematically attacking discrimination, during the '60s and early '70s, violent crime was booming. Since 1960 the rate of robbery, murder and rape has almost tripled. Lately it has become fashionable to target the culprits, not the causes?simply to catch criminals and lock them...
...long and losing battle against the Seabrook, N.H. plant. Meltdown at Montague proves valuable, then, simply because it is the least hysterical and most readable factual account of nuclear power today. While the book most definitely possesses an anti-nuke tone, the reader is hard-pressed to find dogma. The closing pages suggest that because nuclear power plants are here to stay, we must perfect emergency plans to minimize the damage of a possible meltdown. If the idea of a radioactive plume blown eastward over Boston from Montague doesn't make you stop and think--and worry--about nukes, nothing...