A bit more on my feelings about the relationship between faith and reason.
I think that the core of my recommendation requires a close attention to rhetoric to fulfill. There are ways to subtract "faith" from the discussion subtly, and in such a way that it can't be brought back to bear on us at a particular moment. It's about raising the level of debate to a point where faith simply can't answer the questions that we're posing, or where faith is not on the table for discussion. To give a probably inadequate example, using the parable of the loaves and fishes to make an argument for increasing social services spending makes no appeal to faith whatsoever - it's a story, like any other, with a moral message. Like you say, the Bible sends a lot of different signals, and I think that secularists shouldn't be afraid to use them - but to explicitly appeal to them as sources of wisdom, rather than as divinely inspired. No Christian will argue with a use of the Bible for inspiration, and they may be more likely to get into a rational, reasoned discussion if they feel comfortable with the symbolic ground. Then, once we're talking about morality, rather than God, we're on "our turf," even if the discussion is centered around the Bible. Faith isn't relevant anymore - we're having a conversation.
If you believe that faith in itself is a bad thing, then I think we'll have to agree to disagree - I'm more of the school that faith is a form of knowledge. I think that most thoughtful religious people are reflective about their faith, and make moral decisions through a framework of faith, but on the basis of other sources. The debate between liberation theology and evangelism, or green fundamentalists and snake-handlers, takes place within the context of a shared faith, but almost nothing else is held in common between these different groups, and their interpretations of what exactly faith means are themselves vastly different.
This is just my opinion, but I believe that people who think about their religiosity are as a group no better or worse for humanity than people who think about life in general. It's not religiosity, but thoughtfullness, that makes the man (or woman). Many people turn to religion out of a sense of helplessness with their own lives - but this is a result of the particular formation of religion-as-succor (cf Nietsche) and, I would say, the economic conditions of our times. Did religion literally cause the Inquisition? Is religion causing Al-Qaeda? I'm more inclined to believe that religion forms a channel through which other, probably more basic forces travel (it's a lot like race in that regard).
Economic exploitation, fear of mortality, anger at your lack of control over the world . . . these are motivators. The image of Christ on the Cross never made anyone pick up a gun, and neither did the Q'ran - they were simply the available means by which people's feelings were expressed. We have seen a lot of violence inflicted in the name of religion because it has been a dominant mode of Western thought for millenia, but I hardly think that the fall of religiosity would solve all of these problems - the Soviet Union and China both managed to kill a whole shitload of people while officially atheist. The Cultural Revolution and the French Revolution easily match the Crusades and the Israeli treatment of Palestine for sheer brutality and inhumanity any day. The Enlightenment tended to denigrate religion per se as a roadblock to rationality - but, to phrase it in the most extreme possible way, it was the unbending rationality of the Enlightenment itself that paved the road to Dachau.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending religion as a whole, but I think that it's more important to emphasize that there is good religiosity and bad religiosity, and that the two shouldn't be lumped together. I've known many brilliant, thoughtful, incredibly humane people who were also deeply religious. The fact that they were the exception rather than the rule speaks to repeated failures of moral leadership and will within the social category of "religion," where powermongers within the Christian church in particular have repeatedly pandered to the worst in their congregations and turned tail against every kind of genocide that involved people who had already been born. But I wonder if a condemnation of religion as such doesn't, like anti-Iran rhetoric, scare off the good ones even as it hardens the bad ones against us.
