I can not pass on coming traffic without some faith that the other driver is not feeling suicidal.
I can not cross a bridge without faith in some engineers and construction workers.
It is not a plausible way of life to check on the veracity of all the thousands upon thousands of assumptions we make every day. Heck, checking one fact would require the assumption of more than one other fact.
Every day we all operate in faith, and none of us have any real choice.
excellent argument.
I can not pass on coming traffic without some faith that the other driver is not feeling suicidal.
Perhaps you are confusing religious faith with trust. I can observe in my pre-driving-age years, that the vast majority of traffic situations involve people who are not suicidal, and who will do the right thing and stay on their side of the road. If I lived in a society where most of my fellow drivers were raging drunk, and no authority were effectively intervening to prevent this from happening, I might conclude that the roads were not a good place to be. I can make a decision (rational or not) to trust depending on my observations of what actually happens in a given space of time.
Religion does not pass this observational test. Actually, it fails quite spectacularly, since bad things happen to religious people all the time.