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Lumifer comments on Religious and Rational? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think that's the strongest move. Faith as allegiance, trust, submission, etc.
There has always been a fundamental equivocation in "Faith in God", which most atheists mistake only as "Belief that some being exists", and not "choose to trust and obey God".
When you combine that with our notion of instrumental rationality and rationality as winning, you have a clear path to the rationality of faith in God:
Choosing to trust in God and submit to God leads to winning.
I recall a Christian gal I knew in high school saying "I just concluded that I would have a happier life if I believed in God." At the time, that struck me as blasphemous. I was appalled. You believe it without regard to correspondence to reality? Self willed delusion? But once one no longer makes a fetish of epsitemic truth, it's perfectly sensible.
Instances where you 'trust and obey' something without regard to its epistemic truth but seeking something else out of that 'trust' or 'faith' should arguably be regarded as aliefs, not beliefs. So is it rational to alieve in a god? Well, the answer will probably depend on what your goals are and what god, or gods, you're alieving in at any given moment. If you're part of a group of warriors trying to enter some kind of collective berserker-like frenzy, it may be rational to alieve in a warlike deity like Mars, Thor or (at some level, at least) the Abrahamic god/Yahweh. But maybe you have other goals, and you'd do best by placing your faith in an entirely different deity.