pharisees. Ideally real beliefs get put into practice; you are not bigoted about them, you are open to reason; and if some of your beliefs prove to be mistaken you scrap them, and allow their place to be taken by new beliefs which approximate nearer to the truth than the old ones did. The last thing you do is to ram them down someone else's throat. The beliefs you ram down your neighbour's throat are in fact the beliefs you do not believe in; not the ones you do believe in. Or to pick up the idiom of Chapter 4, they are the beliefs you are not confident about. You believe them, but only with a little faith; and so perhaps as a psychological defence mechanism, to prevent the beliefs being taken from you, you aggressively force them on other people. We all do it; I do not believe anyone is entirely exempt; it just happens that the church's attempts have been more obvious, more flagrant, and more foolish than most other people's, because the attempt was more obviously a denial of everything the church stood for; goodness, mercy, turning the other cheek.
Mr. Krushchev frequently denounced the dogmatists in Russia, and I think rightly, as a pest to the society to which they belonged. I think one may go further; the dogmatists anywhere, whether Marxist-Leninist, Roman Catholic, or Church of England, are all of them a pest to the society to which they belong. And really it makes very little difference what dogma they are propagating, because they are all perpetrating (or trying to perpetrate) the same error. They are trying to make people pay lip-service to beliefs, which they do not really believe in themselves. So if they are successful, we end with the situation that everyone subscribes to the beliefs, but the dogmatists don't really believe in them, and their converts are content to pay lip-service. In other words we enter a world of fantasy, and make-belief, in which everyone professes to believe, and nobody does; but yet in which nobody cares, or nobody dares, to speak the truth and say that the whole thing is a farce anyway. Obviously the process has a…