Auto, I don't have the patience to respond point by point to that novel.
My points are pretty simple:
1) Everyone has reasons for what they believe.
Of course. And my point is that some reasons are better than others.
2) Everyone has faith, even by your definition. You just don't like it when people disagree with you, apparantly. That doesn't make them immoral.
To the extent they do, it's a bad thing.
Here's some info I'd like you to consider:
Have you heard of created memory? You can actually create a memory in someone--anyone. It takes about a month. What you do is to ask them questions as if it were true. For example, the researchers asked people, "Who found you the time you were lost as a child? How long were you lost? etc." At the end of the month, the people have real, vivid, specific memories of having been lost, and can tell you all about it, including what it felt like. These memories are exactly as real as memories of events that did happen.
Second, young children, by nature (I would say due to evolution) trust and believe what the adults who take care of them tell them. They have to, to survive to adulthood.
Then think about how we teach children religion. We don't say, "There is a God," or "The evidence supports the existence of God." We assume there is a God and we know who He is, and we tell them what they need to know about Him, what He expects of us, etc. "God loves you, God wants you to be good..."
So children grow up with a real, vivid, existing God--in their brains. Whatever God their parents/community/church tells them about. And that God is as real as their house and family. They can tell you all about Him.
Now when you get into religious experiences of the really intense type, going into visions etc. What we see is that we can induce this experience through temporal lobe stimulation. People with temporal lobe epilepsy tend to have them. They have some qualities in common--a sense of peace and well-being, of being loved absolutely, and of oneness with the universe and nature. But when you get to the specifics, each person sees or experiences the God they were raised to know as real. They're having a real experience (whether you see it as solely physical or spiritual or whatever) but that experience gets filtered or framed in terms of the God they already know.
So Catholics see the virgin Mary, Muslims experience Allah or jinn, etc.
So what I'm saying is that this sort of thing--and more--fits the facts better than the idea that there really is a superpowerful invisible Creator who set the galaxies to spinning and intensely interested in what we wear on our heads--or whatever specific God you like.
