Faith & Spirit Quote by Bernard Katz

Katz, a scientist with a scalpel for metaphor, doesn’t just accuse religion of being false; he accuses it of being persuasive. The striptease comparison is the tell: what matters isn’t what’s revealed, but how the audience is guided to want the reveal. “Power of suggestion” frames belief less as a truth-claim than as a psychological technology - pacing, anticipation, selective disclosure. The jab is aimed at method: religion, in this view, wins not by evidence but by staging.

The second punchline sharpens the cynicism. “Like the Virgin Birth” isn’t deployed as a theological argument; it’s rhetorical shorthand for a story that asks to be accepted precisely because it sits beyond verification. Katz’s phrase “immaculate deception” flips a sacred adjective into an indictment, implying that the purity on offer is often the purity of packaging: a clean narrative that immunizes itself against scrutiny by appealing to mystery, sanctity, or tradition.

Context matters. Coming from a 20th-century scientist, this reads as postwar secular confidence laced with frustration at public credulity. It also reflects a period when science increasingly owned the cultural language of authority while religion retained mass influence. Katz is policing boundaries: if science demands falsifiability, religion, he suggests, thrives on unfalsifiability - and then markets that as virtue.

The subtext is less “religion is silly” than “religion is effective,” and that’s the more unsettling claim: that large portions of social life run on narratives engineered to feel inevitable, not arguments designed to be tested.