I honestly don't think many of them have blind faith anymore. It seems like more of a cultural thing they go along with for most people I come across.

brainwashing from an early age. it's not necessarily a sign of low intelligence, although it certainly can be. one doesn't have much control over what one's parents tell one repeatedly from birth.

g

If you do not have such a capability, don't worry, you're not missing out on any thing good.

As a former fundamentalist, the only excuse I can offer is that I was pretty much born into it (family converted when I was age 3, I followed at age 5) and so it's compartmentalization, special pleading, and operant conditioning combined with a powerful, well-evolved set of interrelated memes.

The abstractions work, until they don't. In my case, "a series of unfortunate events" did violence to the things my faith predicted and the explanations it offered, vs. lived experience. The pain of resolving that cognitive dissonance became greater than the pain of letting go of it ... so I let go.

I think this is a huge point ... it's not a trivial thing to leave a faith tradition. In doing so you are likely leaving the only belonging and community you've ever known, and taking on a lot of personal responsibility that you haven't previously "priced in" to your existence -- actually evaluating facts and evidence and even the process of learning how to do so, is a whole extra level of effort.

Nor is it just a loss of community; it can bring with it censure, shame, rejection, and a cascade of further losses, often at the level of immediate family and longstanding friendships. In some parts of the US, for example, it can cost you your job, or at least your advancement prospects. And it can provoke primal terror of eternal perdition (operant conditioning, again). Sometimes, it can end marriages or estrange you from siblings or children.

Meanwhile in the early stages there's little upside other than some relief at not making excuses anymore to yourself or others about your crazy beliefs.

So ... there are incentives to keep the faith, and disincentives not to. Fairly profound ones.

I am glad I got out but it was, to put it mildly, a non-zero amount of effort to make it happen.

Faith is when you know because you know because you know, because you just know. Do you know? No.

You don’t need other people’s reasons. You just need your own.

Is it ironic that the band Blind Faith wrote a song titled 'Can't Find My Way Home'?

They yammer about faith, have faith, believe in what you can't see, be strong in faith. They talk of "laying up treasure in heaven", living for the afterlife...because if there isn't a reason for the sucktadtic & horrible shit that happens, some godly plan or lesson to learn or worse, someone close to you has forced god to use you as an object lesson to "bring them back to the fold"... its because they don't want to take full responsibility for their actions & own their own shit plus, this life is all there is & they can't fathom that dead stop & eternal dirt nap.

A lot of them can’t stand the thought that when we’re dead it’s over!! So they cling to something that gives them something to hope for after death. Hell I’ve known very intelligent people who were religous.

Blind faith is a euphemism for STUPID!

Depends on how gullible a person is and how they were raised. I brokefree from the religious bs. So it can be done.

I think your premise that they are rational people is flawed, though they may seem rational in other aspects of their life. Faith, by definition is concerning something that cannot be confirmed or proven, or else it it would be knowledge. Most reason is actually rationalization, that is, first you believe something and then you "reason" your way backwards to the conclusion that you have already made.

Don't blame me
Don't blame me
Don't blame me
Don't blame me

Only a rock aficionado will know

Some people, probably most people, are able to compartmentalize their thinking. On their job, for example, they are able to think rationally, but when it comes to religion, they don't. Some people do this with politics too. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists ever, was able to do this. Of course, knowledge of evolution hadn't been discovered in his time...

An intellectual theologian will admit to the lack of proof of any god, and to the need to take a so called leap of faith. I will converse with said people; in fact when I first started teaching I taught at a Catholic school and one fellow I enjoyed conversing with taught religion (in his case, more ethics and centered on Jewish writers from the Holocaust).
The reason anyone, especially those who think and logic, would accept a leap of faith differs; and, I have absolutely no idea why an otherwise intelligent person would make that choice.
The zombies who follow their religion because they believe it to be god ordained are easier to understand: lacking in intellectual fortitude or understanding or capacity.
Then there are those who choose to believe because they think doing so will excuse their lack of moral character.

Faith is blind
Faith is only sadness,
Faith is total madness,
Wit has gone away.
Faith is lies,
How well we remember
In the heat of sacred fervour
Prudence dies

How long will it take?
Till we can’t remember
Truth they said we should avert?
We’ve been trying
Since we did convert.

Faith is blind
Faith no variation
Faith is "You are mine now,
And you never will decry."
Faith is blind
Faith has no perspective
And we’re slowly dying
Here in days gone by

At the sunrise
Wake up to the sound of screaming
No one else will scream for thee
sadly it’s not over
Truth won’t let us be.

Faith is blind,
Faith it is your prison,
Faith makes your decision
Freedom gone away.
Faith is lies
How well we remember
In the heat of sacred fervour
Prudence dies.

Family is a big part of it too. People have a strong need to belong, especially to family. Then there's those religions that give family members no choice but to shun erring members.

Pure rationality would force them to face scary truths, and perhaps they are simply too afraid to do it.