Faith & Spirit Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins starts with an admission that’s almost strategically disarming: the old liberal bargain with faith. Let people have their private metaphysics, he implies, and the rest of us can roll our eyes and move on. Calling religion “harmless nonsense” isn’t just provocation; it’s a portrait of complacency, the posture of the educated skeptic who treats belief like an eccentric hobby rather than a force with institutional muscle. The “crutch for consolation” line sharpens the condescension on purpose. It frames religion as emotional infrastructure for the vulnerable, not a rival system of truth-claims. That framing matters because it sets up the pivot.

“September 11th changed all that” arrives as a hard cut, a journalistic jump edit that converts tolerance into urgency. The subtext is an argument about causality: that ideas are not sealed inside skulls, that doctrines have downstream effects, that “belief without evidence” is not quaint but combustible under certain conditions. Dawkins isn’t only talking about terrorism; he’s indicting the cultural etiquette that treats religious conviction as exempt from normal standards of justification. The quote’s real target is the immunity religion often receives in polite society.

Context does the heavy lifting. Post-9/11 Western discourse was saturated with attempts to separate “true” faith from “extremism,” to preserve religion’s moral legitimacy while condemning violence as a distortion. Dawkins rejects that firewall. His intent is to reclassify faith from private comfort to public risk, and to demand that religion be argued with as aggressively as politics or science - because, in his view, it already behaves like both.