One of the signs of the dogma-slave is the confusion of human authority with divine authority, and inability to distinguish between them.
For example, consider a traditional Christian's view of the Bible. The Bible, we are told, consists of instructions provided by God. But has God Himself told the believer that this is so? No. Other human beings have told him. Thus, in accepting the Bible as reflecting the authority of God, the believer is implicitly accepting the authority of those other human beings who have told him this, to determine what is or is not the word of God. The authority of the Bible is therefore only as good as the authority of those human beings, and unless those human beings were also divinely inspired, the believer really has no good way to know this about the Bible.
In fact, there's a whole chain of human links between God and the believer by way of Scripture, with logical dependence as follows:
Statement X found in the Bible is believed because
the Bible is God's word, which is believed because
the authors of the Bible were divinely inspired, and
the Jewish and Christian authorities who selected the books knew which ones were divinely inspired, and
the books were not edited or altered by these authorities, and
the translations available correctly provide the original meanings
and all of this is believed because
certain human beings (living and dead) have said so.
It's the final sentence that's the important one, the one on which all of the others logically depend. If those who SAY that the Bible is divinely inspired, etc., are THEMSELVES divine authorities, then that should be believed. And yet, few Christians, if any, will make that claim, and this makes the claim of divine inspiration of the Bible dependent on the say-so of fallible human beings.
Yet this is forgotten or glossed over. When I dispute some point or other of Christian doctrine (or Muslim, or whatever -- I don't mean to single out Christianity as unique in this way), I am sometimes accused of questioning the word of God, when in reality what I am doing is questioning the word of those fallible human beings who have claimed that the Bible is the word of God. I do not believe that those human beings were incapable of making a mistake, and indeed, I believe that they did just that.
The irrationality of the belief that the Bible is the word of God, given the very shaky foundation of evidence on which this belief rests (ultimately, the unsupported say-so of people who have no ability to make that discernment) is quite obvious, and so the only plausible conclusion is that people make this mistake and think this way for non-rational, emotional reasons. What I think is behind it, from the believer's perspective, is a desire to be told what to do, a natural submissiveness and fear of freedom, a desire for a (benevolent) master. This is wholly separate from the desire for the love of God, for God is no one's master. (Whoever has an ear, let him hear.)
