Faith: The sure and certain way to know that ever other faith is wrong.
Faith is just not a sensible way to live your life. If you tried to use 'faith' in anything but a religious context, and as an excuse for believing what you want to be true rather than what you know to be true, you would, if you were lucky and lived in a society which cared, be taken into care and kept under supervision for your own good.
Take a simple thing like crossing a road:
A normal adult with average intelligence will step up to the edge of the curb, look both ways, check that there is nothing coming and not even turning out of a near-by side road, and, if they see no cars, will accept that absence of evidence for a car as evidence of absence of a car. They will then cross the road, not considering for one moment that there may be an invisible car coming. They happily, and perfectly rationally, bet their life on the absence of evidence.
Imagine the reaction you would get if you tried to stop a normal person from crossing the road by telling them absence of evidence was not proof of absence and so the wrong way to go about it; they should have faith in a car being there. After all, if they have faith and accept there is a car coming and don't cross the road, what do they lose even if there isn't one? On the other hand, if there is a car coming, they gain everything. Risk nothing to gain everything.
No contest! Go with faith and save your life!
Before I went shopping today I checked in the larder first to see what we needed. I could have just used faith and assumed we had enough of everything, and anyway what would be the point of checking when absence of something like a tin of beans or a bag of rice isn't proof that we had none? In fact, what was the point of going shopping at all?
Fortunately, I'm a sane, rational adult and don't believe that things are real just because I have faith that they are.And so do most Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Shintoists and followers of other religions requiring their followers to 'just have faith' and to bet their lives on the absence of evidence not being enough evidence of absence. It's only when it comes to believing the things their priests and preachers tell them to believe that they are told this infantile, irrational and intellectually indolent approach to reality is a virtue.
I'm not sure which is the least rational here: believing by faith or believing what the priests and preachers say. If you really believed their logic you could not live a normal life and would not even cross the road.
Why did the Believer cross the road? Because they don't believe in faith; they believe in evidence, just like normal people do.
Note: Believers who got this far and think my logic is wrong, are free to explain why.
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