Episode 3, God beyond dogma.
Hey guys, I am glad you are here. This is the way of the fool and today, I will talk to you about dogma — and how it gets in the way of the truth.
In the first episode, we began with the premise that, at its core, religion shouldn't be about rules or rituals, but about a journey — a return to the divine.
In Episode 2, we looked at how materialism tried to replace that journey with cold logic… and left us feeling pretty empty.
But materialism didn’t just appear out of nowhere — it was, in many ways, a reaction. A response to what happened when religion lost its way. When what may have started as genuine revelation got buried under layers of dogma. When religious institutions stopped being guides… and became gatekeepers.
So how much of what we call religion today is truly divine — and how much is just tradition, power, or fear dressed in sacred robes?
Where’s the line between revelation and dogma?
And more importantly: how do we tell the difference?
Regarding religious knowledge in general, it is necessary to draw the line between actual revelation and the dogmas around it. Revelation is never absolute; it’s right for the time, the place, and the people receiving it (when it’s not completely fabricated). Some aspects may still be relevant today and will remain relevant in the future. But it’s never the final word. There is always room for growth — always more to uncover.
The real problem begins when revelations harden into dogmas. Some dogmas exist for the sake of tradition; others are designed to preserve the moral authority of religious leaders. And to be fair, dogma can offer comfort — even existential stability. When shared across a community, it creates a sense of belonging and identity.
But if what you’re after is truth, dogma won’t get you there. In Religion, understood as a journey back to the divine, dogma doesn’t guide you forward — it freezes you on the spot.
In the end, the only ones who benefit from religious dogma are the ones guarding it.

Declaring something as a dogma helps if what you’re really after is power. Because dogma always comes with a group — the ones who claim ownership, who administer it, who interpret the “truth” on your behalf.
And if you can convince people that you alone hold the truth about something as fundamental as God, you gain power over anyone searching for it.
Establishing dogmas becomes necessary when you need to justify your authority — but have little to no evidence to support your claims. They emerge in every religion because they assert knowledge of the unknowable — and do so with absolute certainty.
But by their very nature, religious claims are nearly impossible to support with empirical evidence. Even the testimonies of firsthand witnesses are never 100% reliable. In a courtroom, when two people tell the exact same story word for word, it raises suspicion — it suggests they may have rehearsed a lie.
The gospels are a good example: they were put into writing at least a few decades after the death of Jesus, and they don’t always agree with each other. In fact, even within the same gospel, there are different versions. Take Luke 3:22, the scene of Jesus’ baptism. In the Alexandrian textual tradition, the heavenly voice says: “You are my beloved son; in you I am well pleased.” But in the Western tradition, it says: “You are my son; today I have begotten you” — a direct quote from Psalm 2:7 (20).
This particular variation deserves a deeper look, and we’ll come back to it in a future episode. But for now, it’s enough to say this: even within a single gospel, the text is not fixed. This variation is expected but becomes problematic when you want to present it as the absolute truth. In this particular example, the meaning changes dramatically.
Saying, "You have to believe and have blind faith in what I am saying —because that's what God wants" is more effective than dealing with the holes in your own story. But, as we’ve seen, it doesn’t work forever.
Any dogma prevents us from getting closer to the truth. This is the equivalent of saying, "This is the end of the line; we have achieved absolute knowledge regarding this particular topic." If you are even a little bit aware of how limited we are as humans, it becomes very clear that this is simply not possible. Religious dogma, like any other type of dogma, is a wall that prevents us from going any further in the search for truth—and therefore, the search for God.
Let's go back to the Bible one more time. If we start browsing it, we will quickly find beautiful passages that genuinely feel like the product of divine inspiration. Nevertheless, there are several things we must consider before taking everything in the Bible literally as the absolute and truthful word of God.
First, chances are, you are not reading a single word in the original language. Not the one it was written in, and certainly not the language it was first spoken in. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic; the original versions of the Gospels in Greek.
These stories were passed down orally for generations or at least decades before they were put down in writing.
Another point to remember is that the person who received the revelation and the one who wrote it down were most likely not the same person. Moreover, both were human and, therefore, fallible.
Italians have a saying: “Traduttore, traditore.”
It means: “Translator, traitor.”

This simple phrase already requires further explanation and that’s exactly its point.
Anytime people translate something into another language, one may encounter trouble trying to convey the exact original idea. That is the best-case scenario. But it will become a problem when people start taking what's written literally, word for word—which, unfortunately, happens often.
It becomes worst, however, when the translator either makes a mistake or purposely modifies the text. Let’s take the horns in Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses (and many other representations of Moses from the time) as an example.
Back in 382 AD, Pope Damasus I asked Jerome of Stridon (Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translators) to create a consistent version of the Bible in Latin, which we know now as the Vulgate. Funnily enough, the idea was to avoid future misunderstandings.
The theory is that when working on the Exodus, Saint Jerome interpreted the verb karan, which could be translated as "to radiate”, as the word keren, meaning "horn." An honest mistake since, first of all, they are both written the same way in unpointed Hebrew, קרן (nrk), and second, the verb karan is actually derived from the noun keren.
This should be considered a minor mistake in an otherwise colossal and productive effort, which had some minor but rather long-lasting consequences.
A few centuries later, the Masoretes added vowel markings to the Hebrew bible, making it clear it was karan “to shine”, rather than keren “horn”.
But the damage was already done.
It wasn’t until the reformation that Bibles started using the correct translation. And it was only until the 1979 — yes, the XX century — for the Catholic Church to oficially adopt the change in its latin Bible, the Nova Vulgata.
Vernacular translations started using radiant in the 1940s. But in latin, Moses kept his horns for over 1,500 years. And that’s the point: even the best intentions can lead to centuries of confusion — especially when we treat every word as infallible.
With ease, one may find major logical gaps in most if not all religions.
A common argument made by modern atheists is that everyone is an atheist because they do not believe in other people's God (or gods). They, the atheist, just reject one additional God. Let's admit that's a clever way to put it and highlights an unfortunate characteristic of most of organized religions in the world: they claim to be the sole owners of the absolute truth.
By default, everyone else must be wrong. Access to divine truth God becomes a geographical lottery — and somehow, everyone claims they’ve won.
This is a deeply flawed idea, to put it mildly, and it must be challenged.
But, this isn’t a new insight and can be dismissed with relative ease.
When it comes to monotheism, different traditions have different beliefs, different rituals and different prophets, but worship the same creator God. If we put together the 2.3 billion Christians, the 1.9 billion Muslims, and 15 million Jews, we could assume that roughly 4.2 billion people worship the same God.
Polytheistic religions, also have some sort of creator God concept. The Mexicas (wrongly referred collectively as just Aztecs (21)), for example, had Ometeotl, a dual cosmic force of creation consisting of two deities: Ometecuhtli (the Lord of Creation) and Omecihuatl (the Lady of Creation). Together, they embodied the masculine and feminine creative aspects of the universe — united in the act of creation (22).
In Hinduism, the god responsible for the creation of the universe is Brahma. He is part of the Trimurti, together with Vishnu, who preserves the universe, and Shiva, who will eventually destroy it.
Whether we call it Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Trimurti, or Ometeotl, to name a few—most of the religions in the world can be seen as reaching toward the same absolute creative force, either as a totality or as different aspects of it.
Probably the clearest way to understand this discrepancy is the parable of the blind men trying to understand the elephant by touching only one part of it. Each groped a different part and concluded that the elephant was a thick snake (the trunk), a wall (the side), a tree (one of the legs), and so on—you get the idea. In some versions, the blind men accuse each other of lying and come to blows (it doesn't get much more accurate than this). In other words, God is simply beyond our comprehension, and we can only aspire, in our time-restricted existence, to have but a glimpse of His nature. Different cultures have focused on different aspects of God. With the minuscule information we can gather, we cannot generate the whole picture—and most likely never will. This, in turn, gives rise to many seemingly different religions that are actually addressing the same mystery from limited perspectives. One of the earliest versions of this parable dates back to the 5th century BC, by the way, so it's definitely not a new concept.
An atheist, in this analogy, would be an extra blind man who arrived late. Hearing the commotion, he reached out in the opposite direction of the elephant, felt nothing, and confidently concluded there was nothing there at all.
The chances of humanity reaching the absolute truth are close to non-existent. Yet we should strive for it — because truth is where our freedom lies. The truth will set you free, remember? Even if we never get to know the final truth about anything, the search for it is essential. That is the beauty of scientific research: scientists never stop in their pursuit of knowledge.
Imagine if, two hundred years ago — just to pick a number — a council had gathered, sorted the current knowledge regarding biology or medicine, discarded a few things they didn't like, and then declared there was nothing left to learn. This would be absurd and it is absurd when it comes to Religion as well. Just as there are countless things we ignore in physics, chemistry, and biology, so are there in metaphysics.
We should not dismiss the topic simply because empirical evidence is nearly impossible to come by. But we must be aware that the absence of clear evidence means we can never be one hundred percent sure about anything metaphysical claim. We should always proceed with caution; we may be profoundly wrong.
Moreover, blindly following the instructions of another human being — who, in the best-case scenario, simply cannot have all the answers, and, in the worst, is a delusional psychopath — is not only unwise but incredibly dangerous.
Thank you for tuning in, remember, I am just a fool on a journey to find the truth, if you are as well, welcome —let’s walk together.