Belief?

[Edwardo Piet]

It's really easy to explain:

Faith is credulity. Credulity is an important trait in children because they need to believe their elders when they tell them of dangers in life (i.e. pass their experience on to them).

Theism is anthropomorphism of causality. It is important to expect events to have intelligent causes (i.e. be caused by someone rather than something) because that kind of paranoia can save your life or your meal.

It's easy to see why those properties are helpful, evolutionarily speaking, though easy to go wrong (leading to religious beliefs as a waste of resources).

Remember that nothing in evolution has to be "good", it just has to be good enough or not too harmful. Religion has been self-sustaining enough not to go extinct, but that doesn't mean it DOES anything useful.

I would assume that religious faith has some benefits socially, but I fail to see how that can balance the huge costs. It provides an incentive for social (read: pseudo-altruistic) behaviour, but that's about it.

If I've understood you correctly, I couldn't agree more...I'm better at thinking than I am at explaining.

The key word I used was 'evolutionary'; by evolutionary merit....I didn't mean GOOD or USEFUL I just meant good for evolutionary reasons...like a trait that helps a species to survive or reproduce.