Faith & Spirit Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins writes like a biologist staring at culture through a microscope: faith isn’t merely a belief, it’s a replicator with survival tricks. Calling it a “meme” is the provocation that does most of the work. He borrows evolutionary language to strip religion of special pleading, reframing it as a unit of transmission that competes, mutates, and persists not because it’s true, but because it’s good at getting copied. The phrase “blind faith” tightens the target: not spirituality, not ethics, but the kind of commitment that treats doubt as betrayal.

The line’s sharpest move is “unconscious expedient.” Dawkins isn’t alleging a smoky back room where clergy design anti-skepticism campaigns (though critics hear that accusation anyway). He’s describing a self-sealing mechanism: if a belief system can train adherents to treat questions as sin, arrogance, or temptation, it reduces the chance of falsification. Rational inquiry becomes not just inconvenient but taboo. That taboo is the immune system.

Context matters: this is classic Dawkins of The Selfish Gene/The God Delusion era, when “memetics” served as a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural critique. It’s also a pointed jab at the social technologies of religion: childhood indoctrination, community enforcement, and moralized certainty. The subtext is political as much as philosophical. A society that normalizes discouraging inquiry doesn’t just protect doctrines; it primes citizens to accept authority, policing curiosity as a character flaw. Dawkins’s intent is to make skepticism feel like hygiene: not edgy, just necessary, especially when an idea’s first line of defense is to tell you not to look too closely.