By creating a precedent for believing things without proof, you set yourself up to be controlled by people who can persuade you to believe the things they want you to believe without proof

I disagree for several reasons.

First, there's proof for very few things; there's evidence for a great many things. That's one of them Scientist Caveats I was talking about elsewhere. ;)

But I don't think anyone really accepts things without evidence. What differs from person to person is what qualifies as acceptable evidence. For some, "evidence" includes "it's in the Bible" or "it sounds right to me" or "I had a dream about it" -- all of these are faith, but don't necessarily set those people up for every charlatan that comes down the pike.

Sure, some really terrible, gory, horrendous things have been done in the history of humanity in the name of God. Some really terrible things have been done with guns, definitely more bad things than good things... is the problem the gun? I don't think so.

Without faith, good people do good things and evil people do evil things.

This relies on the assumption that there are inherently good people and inherently evil people. I reject this assumption without evidence, and set the burden of proof for its truth on you.