Faith and achievement

[Jesster]

And now you are giving the placebo affect more credit than it is worth. Just because someone is able to calm themselves, doesn't mean that there is something special about their ritual. It means they are calm and they can focus more on the task at hand. There are non-ritualistic secular methods that have nothing to do with faith that achieve the same thing.

No doubt.  However, if you look at things like guided visualization, meditation, hypnosis, etc. you have a similar process-- you are trying to rewrite the world view such that the brain will perform better.  But this is not an evidence-based process.  The belief comes from a choice to believe, not from convincing evidence that the person can do whatever it is that they want to do.

No. Helping your brain perform better has been tested. There is evidence for this process. This is trust.