Faith Quote by Douglas Feaver

Faith isn’t the target here so much as a particular kind of performance: the person who wants to seem principled while keeping their principles conveniently empty. Feaver’s line lands because it flips the usual accusation on its head. We’re used to hearing that someone “believes anything” as a jab at gullibility; the kicker is the proviso, “provided it’s not in Holy Scripture,” which turns the speaker into a contrarian with a halo-shaped blind spot. The joke is structural: belief is shown not as conviction but as a sorting mechanism driven by identity.

The subtext is less about theology than about status. Holy Scripture functions as a shorthand for inherited authority, moral constraint, and a community’s shared baseline. To reject that baseline while accepting “anything” else isn’t skepticism; it’s selective incredulity. The line suggests a person who treats tradition like an insult and novelty like proof, whose open-mindedness is really just an allergy to being told “no.” That’s why the sentence feels so sharp: it captures the modern pose of freethinking that’s actually reflexive, a taste preference masquerading as intellectual rigor.

Contextually, it reads like a dry observation from social life: a family gathering, a newspaper column, a parish dispute, any setting where someone loudly claims independence from “old books” while swallowing every fashionable certainty. It’s a compact indictment of reverse fundamentalism: the need to disbelieve the sacred with the same rigidity others use to defend it.