"Faith Is the Enemy of Truth"

"Faith is the Enemy of Truth."
This is either self-evident - or dismayingly alien.
And the points-of-view that find it self-evident or dismayingly alien are easy to identify.
"But Faith is a good thing!" some will cry.
But some of us question that, which brands us with a peculiar stripe of evil.
When I coined the phrase, "Faith is the Enemy of Truth" years ago, I thought that perhaps I had originated a phrase that distilled centuries of thought about religion and belief into an ultimate sound-byte, one that would clarify once and for all one of Philosophy's greatest questions.
Yeah, right.
Not long after that, I read the same quote in a somewhat altered form from Mr. God-Is-Dead, himself; Nietzsche.
The problem with Faith, the problem with Belief, is that they feel so much like Knowledge.
Try this on the next person who asks you what you believe:
Say, "I try not to have beliefs. I find knowledge to be so much more useful."
Mark Twain also said it in his ascerbic way: "Faith is believing things that you know aren't true."
That hits the mark by missing it. Only Twain.
Is it possible that a word ("faith") can be so venerated and yet so unworthy of veneration?
Is Faith a colossal mistake?!
Are there any other examples of words like that?
How about "tradition." Similar can of worms.
Witch-burning was once a tradition.
Infanticide has been a tradition in one culture or another throughout history. Is Tradition necessarily a good thing?
Faith?
On a planet where there are one hundred mutually exclusive "Faiths," what are the odds that your Faith is the true one?
One percent. At best.
"But as long as you have faith, that doesn't matter..."
They are saying, that having faith that a thing is true is more important than Truth.
"Having faith that a thing is true is more important than Truth."
The mind that can believe that is doomed to a life of lies.
Another way of putting it: a god who requires its subjects to believe such a thing in order to escape eternal punishment is an insane god.
I'm captivated by the image presented in one of Philip K. Dick's excellent science fiction novels of the discovery of a gargantuan corpse in space, larger than any planet, stranger in structure than any life form ever encountered or imagined. Nietzsche's dead God.
Of course, what Nietzsche meant was that the concept of God is dead. That the mind of Man had reached the point intellectually that it could no longer sustain primitive beliefs in supernatural beings.
If only.
A culture in which supermarket tabloids still sell like hotcakes is far from out of the mental swamp of Faith.
Ayn Rand's view was that Religion is a primitive form of Philosophy.
I think that pretty much nails it.