while I agree I think faith is a bit more than just human nature, I think it's a mechanism developed over centuries to deal with the unknown while our minds continued to expand to understand the unknown.

I think of it as a bug, maybe a little hack that was put in to deal with situations that defy explanation. it helps us come up with explanations, it has a function to deal with unexplained events without loosing our mental model of the world.

faith is like a shim, there is a piece of a mental model that doesn't exist and doesn't fit with your platform, so faith exists as a way into shim that difference into your code base.

religion is code that takes advantage of the shim. however religion is a virus and it takes over your other mental faculties, weakening them. introducing functions that make no sense, but will continue to run until your mind finds a place for them.

there are several ways to take advantage of the faith bug but you can see patterns for different types of systems that use faith hooks to make calls to your reason centers and overrides their output. the more these calls override the reason centers the less they are used.

now the point at which the faith bug is the most susceptible to being utilized is during the brains formative years, and this tactic is used incredibly frequently.

so I see and agree with your point that religion is an institution and faith is a function of humanity, but faith is a bug that can be patched and I also would argue that faith is too broad a term for the reasoning functionality of the brain.

faith is a good word to use when we lack the proper terms, but personal and religious faith are a small subset of the entire faith function and I think it needs to be broken up into its requisite parts.

and maybe the overall function that applies to religion in context to faith is world-model_update(previous_model, new_viewpoint, contextual_conviction/external_conviction) and It seems to me that there is early injection malware in religious code and buffer overflow tricks when you can't get the early injection code to work.

thanks for the reply :)

as far as; is it contagious? yes, it's incredibly contagious, in the sense of a virus and how viruses are spread.

We have two immune systems in our minds, logic and fear.

Logic tells me when something is feasible. and fear tells me when it's not.

religion overrides logic with fear to hook into your faith subroutine and take it over.

everyone is susceptible to this attack, but those who are poor, hungry and desperate for something better are more susceptible than others.

so while talking to your neighbors is good and all, you and your kids are now more susceptible to attack and all it will take is getting you when you're at your weakest, and they'll be there, waiting. it sounds more nefarious than you think it is, but they, like men with women, are only there for a single reason. theirs is different but singular as well: to infect your mind with fear and self doubt and open the way for religion to come in and take over.

and once it does and your fully in, it doesn't matter if you change your mind later, because now you have to change your families minds, and they may be more affected than you depending on their defenses. and kids have none. and so now you're stuck and you make excuses and stick up for your lapse in judgement and infect others because you're totally bought in.

I've seen it too many times for it to be a one off. I've been told by so many religious men that they are only in it because their wife/family is. but they don't understand that by letting it happen they're creating Another generation of logically weakened humans.

and therein is my issue, religion makes us weaker, easier to dominate and placate. religion is a virus.