Faith & Spirit Quote by Roger Ebert

Certainty is the real villain here, not God. Ebert, a critic by trade and a humanist by temperament, takes a common political slogan - "God is on our side" - and exposes its psychological trapdoor. The line lands because it flips the supposed comfort of divine backing into a kind of mental prison. If you've outsourced your moral position to an omniscient authority, revision becomes heresy. You're not just wrong; you're disobedient.

The subtext is about how people launder self-interest through holiness. Invoking God isn't merely faith; it's a rhetorical power move that shuts down debate by claiming the highest possible appeal. Ebert's wit is dry, almost conversational, but the logic is brutal: the more absolute your justification, the less room you leave for learning, empathy, or the basic humility of being a fallible person in a messy world. "God sure isn't going to change His" is the punchline and the indictment - divine immutability becomes a mirror held up to human stubbornness.

Context matters: Ebert lived through decades where religion was routinely drafted into culture-war politics, from the Moral Majority to post-9/11 national narratives. As a film critic, he spent a career rewarding characters who evolve and punishing scripts that confuse conviction with depth. This line applies that same critical instinct to public life: the most dangerous stories are the ones that write revision out of the plot.