Yes, Gumby, what you say I can not dispute, mainly because I was there too. I felt a need for some intellectual, mind generated explanation or reason for my existence and so I put my faith in beliefs full of holes. I guess that made them holy.
It's as if we all contain an innate desire for understanding -- be it religious, or scientific, or something.
I sense you hit a certain nail on the head when you said: "They have nowhere else to put their faith". This is not true of course, they do have another "place", we are just blinded to it by our cherished faiths and beliefs.
It seems we are heavily conditioned and programmed from a very early age to rely on faith and beliefs in things external to us and in some other space and time. This is our paradigm. We can not even imagine or comprehend something other, so we are not motivated to even begin to look or question.
Honestly and deeply questioning our cherished and foundational beliefs can be scary as hell. It's kind of like sawing off the very high limb we are sitting on. I understand why few seem to do it. However, continually embracing concepts, ideas and beliefs of a God which exists as a thing out there some place, blinds us to the living Presence of our Source, which exists not in the mental constructs of space and time (Lo here and there), but here and now (within). It is closer than close, and not in anyway separate from the consciousness which looks out these eyes even now.
One might think it would be good news for those who call themselves lovers of God to hear that what the word "God" points to is available within now; and that the only boundaries to God are illusions of beliefs and paradigms within the mind. But I don't find this to be the case. It's seems that we are far too enamored and in love with our ideas and beliefs about God, to let go of them and embrace the Reality.
Perhaps if religious people but down their Bible for a while and read a little Quantum Physics, they may get an idea of a far larger and closer underlying Source than they ever had before. But again, that would require abandoning tiny anthropomorphic concepts of god, and there we go sawing that limb again.
j
