In what to have faith if you can't have faith in God

According to the XIX century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead". As we progress and evolved we became more objective, empirical and scientific. For a lot of us the concept of a deity becomes less and less plausible.

But religion is not just some silly thing people used to believe in the past it actually played an important role, it gave life purpose and helped us deal with though times and death etc.

Looking at religious philosophy it is more of a matter of separating the useful from the crazy. There are some seeds of truth in religion, you don't want to throw the baby away with the bathwater. So then the problem becomes what to keep and what to disregard and whit what to replace the crazy. The bad is there simply because we don't have anything better to replace it with.

Faith is important because it gives you a general direction to walk in life and to some degree protection from negative outcomes. If you can no longer accept the concept of God because it is massively speculative and impossible to prove, that an invisible man lives in the sky and is pulling all the strings, for which I can't blame you.

There might be tempting to abandon all the rules and principles and become a spiritual pirat. To live a relatively selfish and undirected life without guidance where you prioritize yourself. When you do this you are basically replacing the role of God with yourself.

If you are in a relationship and you prioritize yourself you are basically a narcissist and your relationship is going to be to some degree dysfunctional. If you prioritize your partner you are a week dependent person that doesn't maintains his boundaries and again you are going to find yourself in a dysfunctional relationship.

This is why you need something to put in front of the both parties, you need some higher than yourself and your partner principles. There are values that are higher than a human being, like honesty for example. It is a higher value because human can't fully embodi, even the most integral and virtues man ever lived, lied from time to time.

So if you are having an argument and instead of prioritizing yourself or the other party with whom you are arguing, you prioritize truth. This means that instead of trying to win the argument you just try to find out the truth which might make you lose and you will have to apologize and offer retribution if it is possible, simultaneously it means not to cave in if you know you are right.

There is no guaranty that things are going to work out for the better if you are honest, this is why it requires placing your faith that if you are honest with other people things generally work out. Sometimes they won't, sometimes things get worse before they get better while other times things resolve easy and almost instantaneously.

By placing your faith in a higher value you hold yourself to high standards which gives you the benefits of living to those standards, while simultaneously gives you protection from the negative consequences that would come in to your life if you wouldn't live to high standards. The same way people who believe in a God expect to receive favors from their God and protection against adversity.

When you hold yourself to impossible standards like honesty you will always fall a little short, you might get temporarily lost and need to return back to those values. The same way God test the faith of even some of his most loyals followers, when that happen you simply have to return back at holding yourself to higher standards than yourself and you will stop to suffer.