Firstly, faith is not to dispense with rationality, but to adopt rationality. However, these people to whom you spoke are very likely not evidencing genuine Christian faith, but rather replace it with some kind of emotional ("spiritual") experience. Christian (biblical) faith is most definitely rational.

Secondly, though, you will probably have difficulties with this if you are equating rationality with scientific analysis.

Firstly, because the first type of faith is highly supportable. For example, there are at least seven arguments from the existence of reason which elaborate the vast difficulties which naturalism or materialism run into in trying to assert a fully physical universe. While these are not proof for only the Christian god, they are certainly strong arguments for theism in general. However, there are no such evidences for yetis, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.

Secondly, if human beings do have a "major gap" in us which is filled by religion (and I agree that man is incurably religious), in what way does this fact lead necessarily to your conclusion that it is because we wish to feel good about ourselves and avoid the horror of the finality of our existence? You seem to be assuming the consequent. This "major gap" could equally be explained by the fact that we are created in the image of God, and made to be in communion with him. Either conclusion is quite supportable given the premises, and which one we choose is a matter of our existing presuppositions. So we should examine those.

You have misunderstood both faith and rationality. Science is not rational; it presupposes a number of things which are quite unjustified, and does not even claim to be able to justify them. For example, it presupposes a commonality of experience between people, which in turn presupposes people and an external world. It presupposes that our memories are reliable, and then, based on the this assumption and the fact that we remember the past being consistent, it fallaciously (inductively) infers that the future will be like the past, and arrives at the principle of the uniformity of nature. This is just to start with. On top of this, although science assumes an empirical epistemology, it denies the need for a metaphysic (though obviously, by taking an empirical epistemology it implicitly adopts an empirical metaphysic as well). But without a metaphysic it has no basis for an epistemology, and since an empirical epistemology is self-refuting in the first place, it has no basis for knowledge-claims whatsoever. I'd be happy to go into that further.

Faith, on the other hand (and I am talking about biblical faith) is a justified and true belief in God's promise. It was founded and perfected by Christ, who was God; and, this being the case, and since all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ himself, it is impossible to describe faith as irrational or uncertain. The biblical word refers to forensic proof, or to a trust in something on the basis of such proof.

Heh, because if someone famous said it, it must be true! Wait, are you taking that on faith...?

That may be how most people define faith, but it is certainly not Christian faith.

Since evidence is only data interpeted according to a set of presuppositions, you have to take something on faith before you can even get to the point of talking about evidence. Sorry.