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"I do believe in fairies! I do, I do!"
Even in a few stories I like anyway, a common theme in popular literature, television, and movies is how you "Just have to believe!", how you need to "Go with your heart!" and everything will turn out right. Unless we're talking about material that's considered particularly "edgy" or "challenging", most of the time a leap of faith is rewarded generously.
Because that's how the story is written.
And if the leap of faith doesn't work out, it's typically because the faith wasn't "true" enough, or those old demons "doubt" and "thinking too much" got in the way.
This seems to carry into real life with many people, where faith and "the heart" so often benefit from convenient revisionist history, and reason and logic are the convenient retrospective villains. Fall in love with the wrong person? Well, that's because you weren't listening to your true heart.
I don't think all leaps of faith are a bad thing. There are times when action is required, there's not enough information to make a fully informed decision, and one way or another you're forced to make some sort of choice anyway. You might as well hope your intuition or some sentimental inclination points the right direction in some situations, if there's nothing else to go on.
This has nothing to do with typical religion or "spiritualism", however. No one is forcing you to chose a faith. Even when you're in a repressive society that enforces particular religious beliefs, only going through the motions of faith can be forced, there's nothing forcing your interior beliefs.
There are also leaps of faith that aren't a matter of unconditional belief or spiritual belief, but acts of generosity meant to benefit real live human beings, not imaginary deities, where you decide to take a risk that you can depend on a person, not because you absolutely know they are completely reliable, but because having that person know you're putting your trust in him or her is important to that person's feelings.
That type of leap can be a noble act, and I certainly don't recommend against it (although I would often recommend caution). As many of us sometimes learn, however, such leaps of faith often become fodder for sentiments like "No good deed goes unpunished".
I know my thoughts are meandering a bit here. I started thinking about the things in this thread after watching a old episode of "Star Trek - Voyager", "Sacred Ground". While I overall like this TV series, and this one episode wasn't altogether bad, it hit a few sour notes for me, like hearing only one side of the "science is just another form of faith" false equivalency that often gets spouted in this forum, with Captain Janeway playing the skeptic and conveniently, as the script writers would have it, unable to form strong answers in response to the faith-friendly dialog.
The winning solution to the dilemma of the episode, is, of course, a leap of faith.
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