[ArGee]

Beautiful. A truly excellent post. I hope you keep that around so you don't have to re-type it every time you use it.

I would only contend with two points, and these are very minor.

1. While I can not convince anyone by arguments, I can remove impediments to faith by arguments. A person who is convinced that the ocean is only an inch deep and covered at the bottom with razor blades needs to be convinced otherwise before he can be convinced to jump in because the water is fine.
2. People who don't have a true faith may find that is exactly the reason they must convince others or go to war over their faith. As people, we tend to get really upset when we are forced to admit we are wrong. When we start to get the feeling we might be wrong, we can become more aggressive at proving we are right. Without objective fact, we tend to turn to consensus - even consensus created by force.

[HKMk23]

Agreed on both counts.
As to #1, I perhaps should have made clear that my comment was in the limited scope of trying to use arguments to convince an unbelieving person of those things that one only comes to be convinced of AFTER coming to believe; that this limitation on the use of argument didn’t mean that argument is totally useless as a tool for helping people understand other things.

As to #2, I tried to get at that point with my comment about inward frustration over the faults and inadequacies of a false faith.