Dogma

It is largely arguable what constitutes a reasonable justification for believing something. A common criteria indicates that such a justification should involve at least coherence and evidence.
A belief is coherent if it doesn't contradict other belief, particularly knowledge, and fundamentally, scientific knowledge.
Evidence is any observable that is related with the proposition through a logical connection.
I think however that coherence and evidence are sufficient but not necessary conditions to hold a belief (though they are necessary to promote a belief as formal knowledge)

Most people, specially 'intellectuals', consider irrational to believe what is not evidently true or is evidently false. Though there can certainly be 'irrational' beliefs, that is: a belief that is rooted on anything but reason, IMO, it is often misleading and unfair to externally qualify a belief as irrational, simply because externally is next to impossible to judge the justifications that can hold for such a belief. Most intellectuals judge laymen's beliefs based on the grounds of the accepted scientific knowledge, yet in the case of the Factual Sciences, such a knowledge is still not the ultimate truth, so it is plain dogmatic to defend it up to the point of qualifying as irrational a belief simply because is contradicted by Science.
IMO, it is a lot more useful and fair to qualify a belief from a functional perspective: Having a coherent and evident (even if personally) belief is clearly useful: decisions I base on it have a good chance of turning out right. Having a coherent but poorly evident -or even not evident at all- belief is potentially useful: decisions I base on it have some chance of turning out right. However, having an incoherent belief is unlikely to be any useful at all (recall that incoherent means contradicting with other things we believe or know). But in any case, it is the consequence of holding such a belief what ultimately matters for fair qualification.
If I believe in life after death, in whatever form (with any degree of coherence) and for whatever reason (with any degree of evidence) and, as a consequence, I base all my actions on the principle that everything we do has eternal consequences (eternal meaning as long as time itself exists) because death won't put an end on it, I have a useful and justified belief. It is unlikely, certainly not knowledge, but is nevertheless useful and justified (quite far from irrational)

Since not even scientific knowledge is conclusive, we can only be reasonably justified in believing something up to the boundaries of a given context. A belief can turn out to be false -even after it was rightly held true- for a huge variety of reasons: new contradicting evidence, new contradicting and more fundamental theories, or simply the recognition of a mistake in the logical process or evidence verification. There is no such thing as the ultimate truth, except in the case of the logical virtual structures that exist in our minds, like a mathematical axiom, a lexical significant, etc...

There's nothing wrong in believing something -however unlikely or even contradicting with accepted knowledge- when doing so has useful consequences... what is useless -specially in the long term- is to hold the belief as the ultimate and unquestionable truth. This is dogma.
Yet dogmatism is not about believing what is evidently false or not evidently true (as if such a property could be completely determined); it is about denying the fact that all beliefs are inconclusive. There's dogma in Religion, for sure, but there's dogma also in Sciences (just pick up almost any conversation in sci.physics and you'll clearly see it). It doesn't matter if we're talking about the conservation laws of physics: these are based on a huge amount of evidence and a perfect coherence with every scientific theory, yet all such evidence, however huge, is an insignificant fraction of reality and all the theories such laws are coherent with are rooted in the same extremely partial evidence.
It is ironically dogmatic to hold our so-called "laws of universal physics" unquestionable considering that we've been serious about it for just a few centuries (but been here for a lot lot more) and we're just starting to step out our tiny little planet to get real evidence and not just old EM waves.