Looking closely at faith

It may be helpful to make a distinction between "belief" (or faith) and "opinion." (Many languages make a clear distinction but English often confuses the two and treats belief as nothing more than strongly held opinion -- I would suggest that opinion is on the surface while belief is buried deep inside us, and not really noticed as such but just taken for granted).

Belief is an emotional state, opinion and intellectual one.  One comes to believe via indoctrination, one forms an opinion via evidence and reasoning. 

(What is "indoctrination?" It is also called, to bring out the negative aspect, "brainwashing." It happens most often to children wherein they form their notions about the world and their notions of right and wrong ("conscience").  A feel for this can be seen in the sense that up and down are absolutes, not something relative to the planet -- so that around age ten almost everyone goes through a period of intellectual difficulty contemplating why people at the antipodes don't fall off the planet.

Indoctrination happens when we are children because we don't have mature critical thinking abilities yet, but are otherwise very much in learning mode and are full of questions.  It also happens to adults who never fully developed the ability to think critically (we call them gullible), but it can happen to anyone not paying attention.  It is achieved through propaganda rather than reason -- music, parades and raucous rallies, beautiful pictures or buildings, beautiful or appealing ideas, ideas that have wonderful consequences if true -- plus less appealing tactics such as band wagoning, coercion, repetition, invention of false stories and "facts" (lying), reference to unqualified "authority," logical fallacies, "group-think", altered mental states such as from sleep deprivation, drugs, even heavy meditation, and who knows what else.  The thing these techniques for brainwashing people have in common is use of emotional triggers and mental attributes other than reasoning.

I remember being told by a well-meaning but misdirected monk to meditate on the idea of my previous lives, since I plainly doubted they were real.  I meditated hard, for several weeks, several hours a day, and persuaded myself I could remember traces of such lives.  As a result I "believed" this teaching sincerely, for many years, and adjusted my life accordingly.  I later realized the evidence was flimsy, nowhere near enough to support such an extraordinary teaching (the problem of course is that anything could be true, and when one believes (is indoctrinated), one latches onto possibility as proof.  We have emotional (probably derived from early human or maybe even animal instincts to adhere to the views of the group) links to the belief (one wants to believe it and doubt creates emotional stresses (guilt, fear).

I see people who have rejected the religion of their childhood ending up hating the religion and all it stands for, largely for what was "done to them" and the suffering they went through as they developed cognitive dissonances as they learned truths that didn't fit it.  (This happens less in Buddhism since it is not creedal and, while it has lots of teachings, it doesn't insist on bad things if one doubts or rejects).

I also see people who have gone through periods of doubt, maybe even periods of disbelief, who are so tortured by their instincts here that they end up "deciding" to believe in spite of it all.  The body then rewards them with a stopping of the guilt and fear and a replacement with feelings of joy and visits by the Holy Spirit.

"Faith" is, then, really just a cop-out.  It is an excuse for giving in to the indoctrination (almost always of childhood) because one wants to and because doubt produces serious discomfort that takes a long time to get over.