Mages were a special group. They were not particularly devout in matters of faith.
It was not that they had no faith. The overwhelming majority of mages did believe in gods, most often the Lord of Mysteries, the God of Spellcasters, or the God of Scholars. These three had been the mainstream among mages' beliefs. Beyond them, there were all manner of other faiths... Oh, since both the God of Spellcasters and the God of Scholars had fallen, the second most widely worshipped deity among mages now was Vol, the God of Knowledge and Culture. There were even quite a few who worshipped the strange Jellyfish God, Void Mask.
But regardless of which deity they worshipped, mages rarely truly placed faith on equal footing with life, much less above it.
To them, faith was no more than something upon which to rest their ideals. And ideals were ideals precisely because they stood opposite to reality. Most mages were realists. Of course they were willing to pursue ideals, but few were willing to die for them.
In a sense, mages as a group were rather vulgar, far less pure than scholars. Though the two groups had many similarities and even overlapped considerably, scholars stood far above mages in both public reputation and internal cohesion.
Of course, mages did not care about this. On the contrary, they believed their own attitude was the proper way to treat faith—what mattered in faith was the alignment of everyone's ideals. A person could sacrifice themselves for their own ideals, but to sacrifice oneself for faith was to confuse means with ends, putting the cart before the horse.
Some extreme mages even called devout believers fools, believing that they had cast aside humanity's most precious possession—the independence of the spirit—and fallen into tamed livestock, even tools