Faith & Spirit Quote by Eric Hoffer

Hoffer flips a familiar biblical slogan into a cold, modern proposition: when engineering can do what prayer once promised, belief stops looking like courage and starts looking like redundancy. The line works because it doesn’t attack faith head-on; it makes faith obsolete by comparison, like a lantern held up against a floodlight. “Necessary technical skill” is doing double duty here. It’s literal (bulldozers, dams, tunneling, rockets) and sociological: a whole apparatus of expertise, institutions, and planning that turns the world into a solvable set of problems.

The subtext is less “religion is false” than “religion had a job.” Faith that “moves mountains” is a technology of the powerless: a way to face immovable structures when you don’t have leverage. Once society produces enough applied know-how, the emotional and political utility of that kind of faith shrinks. Hoffer, always attentive to mass movements and the psychology of true believers, is warning that certainty doesn’t disappear; it migrates. Technical mastery can become its own creed, complete with priesthoods (experts), rituals (procedures), and heresies (dissent from the model).

Context matters: Hoffer wrote in the long shadow of industrial-scale war, midcentury bureaucracy, and the postwar boom, when “progress” wore a lab coat and carried serious moral baggage. The line needles both camps. It punctures religious self-congratulation and also hints at the spiritual arrogance of technocracy: if you can move mountains, you may start believing you’re entitled to rearrange the landscape of human life, too.