Faith:Continued:Another View :This view is more interesting though

And faith also keeps you going when you rationally should give up
hope, or when your rationality is overcome or undercut by powerful
emotions. You have faith in rationality. Faith is more akin to an
emotion, and rationality to a method of interpreting information. They
are not really opposites, any more than rage is the opposite of a
trial by jury. We associate them with opposite scenarios, but they are
not strict antonyms.

But faith obviously must have survival value, otherwise it would have
been weeded out by evolution quite some time ago. Perhaps when the
world was a much more risky, unknown, isolated place, having faith
allowed our progenitors to survive and succeed when the best, rational
course of action in the face of the unknown was to call it a life and
expire. Like many of the emotions we have, they were shaped in a very
different environment than the typical human finds themselves in
today. My personal suspicion is that faith is a highly useful, good
thing to have, INDIVIDUALLY. It gives us the courage to try new things
that we don't know that we can do, to face disease, death,
selfishness, and all the evil in life and try to make the world a
better place despite that. OTOH, when it starts becoming a group
ritual, it seems to take on many of those negative aspects you
mentioned; it tends to enforce existing power structures, allow one to
suffer through circumstances rather than change them - to make it
acceptable to be a victim, if I may sum up some of what you said.

Faith isn't going anywhere, any more than greed, lust, love, or
curiosity are leaving the human condition. Figuring out how to
accommodate it in society without it becoming a cancer like the
American-style religious right is the challenge.

Faith:What is its use

Hi,
Back after a zillion years. This I got somewhere from Slashdot. Loved it.

I argue the opposite. Faith is a weakness. Faith leads people to
accept their conditions and pray that it will get better rather than
act. Faith leads people to accept conditions that are unacceptable.

Faith keeps women from leaving abusive husbands because the hope
they'll see the light. Faith keeps people from speaking out against
the government because they hope their God will intervene. Faith keeps
people from enjoying the only life they know they have because they
hope that the words in a particular book are true.

Our best quality isn't our ability to blindly accept conditions as
they are because they might change, but to recognize the flaws in our
condition right now through research and figure out a way to change
the stuff we can. In fact, the ability to drastically modify our
environment is what makes us a technological species.

Perhaps you're using a different definition of "faith" than I am.