This is really the crux, isn't it? Pun intended. And it's not just other religions. There are more than 26,000 organized Protestant Christian denominations. Each of those denominations split from a different denomination over issues of faith. The members of new denominations claim their faith has led them to being correct about their religious ideas, and that the religious group they split from got it wrong.

Over 26,000 times.

And that's just Protestant Christianity. Apostolic Christianity (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Chaldean, Syriac, etc) is also riven by disputes based on faith.

And let's be clear about what these disputes lead to. Bloodshed. Murder. State persecution of specific religious groups.

It started in the earliest days of the Christian church when certain bishops beat and murdered other bishops and their supporters over the exact definition of the Trinity. Then, before long, entire communities of Arian or gnostic "heretics" were being put to the sword.

That sort of thing continued right up into modern times. Ask any descendant of French Huguenots, whom the French state slaughtered for having the wrong religious ideas based on faith.

It's really astonishing to me that people can look at faith, which is clearly objectively meaningless, and insist that it's a valid way to know things.

No rational person confronted with evidence could accept that. To my mind, that's what's so dangerous about religion and faith as a concept. The concept makes denying facts and reality possible and even fashionable.

Nonetheless, faith is objectively meaningless. No thinking person who looks at facts could accept anything otherwise.