For me, it also turned the subjects into zombies, slavishly following religious dictums, or blind prophets or high priestesses, peering into the future beyond the restrictions of religion, or prophesying the decline of Western culture.
Since the start of the Cold War, the idea that our country should have a large collection of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops permanently stationed overseas has remained a quasi-religious dictum of foreign and national security policy.
It means that effortful adherence to religious or philosophical dictums (often requiring meditation, prayer or moral education), though clearly valuable and capable of producing results, is not the only way to go.
A good place to start is a hand-scrawled inscription I saw on a crumbling wall in a border town in northern Pakistan that read, "Jihad of the sword, like prayer, is a religious obligation". Most Westerners probably assume that this is an ancient dictum -- and I bet the man who wrote it did, too.
Further stories could be done on whether people in religious congregations are affected by their clerics' theology or would follow a dictum on whom to vote for.
In a 1929 case, Higgins, then a Justice of the High Court, suggested (as obiter dictum) that a person could lawfully object to compulsory voting on the grounds of religious belief.
Consequently, within the NPF, evidence is divided into five useful categories: scientific findings, statistics, polls, legal, and ipso dictum (Smith-Walter et al., 2016), where ipso dictum are overt appeals to an authority such as a religious figure or a celebrity whose status and position count as legitimacy with some populations.
Eisenhower's dictum was taken up by Graham, and soon going to church was more than just something for the religious, it was part of being a good American.
His dictum was: "Everybody is talented".
That old dictum, write what you know?
