"I said you prostituted yourself by teaching in a Catholic school while being an atheist. I did not call you a prostitute - and you would have read me the Riot Act if I had pulled a similar switcheroo. And with all your verbiage and switch-hitting, it's easy to get confused about what you've said and what your personal history is."

Hmm. That woman prostituted herself by having paid-for sex with lots of men. That woman is a prostitute because she had paid-for sex with lots of men. Not a huge amounts of difference, Joe. Why don't you just admit that it was a bloody stupid thing to say, especially as you failed to check the facts that rendered it entirely inappropriate in the first place? There is no confusion of the sort you allude to arising from my "verbiage". Generally, I manage to express myself all too clearly and directly for some of you. You should have checked your facts before you made that horrid remark. Grown ups don't make horrid remarks without doing that first. And you have the nerve to call me highly offensive. I'll get back to that in just a minute.   

" If someone is able to refute something you've said, your usual response is to contend that you never said what you said. If someone does a reasonable paraphrase of what you've said, you play games and pick at their paraphrase instead of their point. You don't play fair."

If you can present me with a single instance where this claim is borne out I'll eat my hat. It's just frustrated, utter rubbish, and you know it.

"Their faith is something they treasure, something they consider to be part of themselves, something that they have chosen for deeply personal reasons that they really can't explain..."

But even though you can't explain it you have no compunction whatsoever in justifying passing it on to children as truth. Well, anyone who tells me that I should believe something, as you do in faith schools, etc., had better be able to explain what it is I'm supposed to believe first, otherwise I might just have to take him for a fool.

"My faith is a matter of the heart, just as my choice to love my wife is a matter of my heart. I can't defend my love for my wife, and I can't defend my faith - and it's an insult and an offense for someone to attack either my love or my faith."

I wouldn't dream of attacking your choice to love your wife, though I seem to recall an intrusive and not-unconnected remark along those lines that you made to someone else recently. Your faith is immune as well, as long as you keep it as your faith and don't try to spread it around as truth, as happens in those faith schools. That's when you are deserving of attack. I have always been at great pains to keep that distinction very clear. Of course, if we're going to discuss religion we are going to get people who don't think your faith falls within the realms of evidence and reason. It can be quite amusing to see rational people, confronted with that, retreating to the realms of matters of the heart. It may surprise you to know that we heathens have hearts just as big as yours, but perhaps we try a little harder to keep them free of bullshit.

" Such matters are not and should not be within the realm of attack and defense. The exception would be if I were to proselytize here or use my faith as a springboard for attacking somebody else, and I have never done that."

You're not going to do much harm proselytising here, except to yourself, as pete does. That is not the argument for me. Rather, it's the justification for proselytising to children in faith schools. I keep on asking the very simple question, among all my verbiage: why do you think it's better to tell children things that are partly or wholly untruthful instead if telling them the unvarnished truth? I wonder whether it could just be that believers are so brainwashed themselves that they can no longer separate fantasy from reality.

"You may claim I've attacked you, but that's not true. I've merely attempted to fend off your constant stream of attacks. I've never attacked anyone's atheism, and I don't believe that McGrath or DMcG have attacked anyone's atheism, either - I would suppose that all three of us have considered ourselves to be atheists or at least agnostics at some times in our lives."

Why don't you sign them up into a gang? It's quite a popular pursuit around here. You may care to ask yourself why my exchanges with them, though bathed in absolute disagreement about many things, are far less abrasive than my exchanges with you. Seems ironic that an atheist should be asking a Catholic to examine their conscience...

"We have disagreed with your constant and vehement attacks against religious belief. Somehow, I guess, attacking your attacks is against your rules. Such is life."

Not so. I have the hide of a rhino. But when people say stupid things about me, as you've done, generally they can expect a bit of comeback. Such is not life. Mudcat threads are not life. Go to the back of the class and write that out fifty times.

"But you attack religion like a dog attacks a bone. You put so much energy into your attacks that it started long ago to seem really weird."

Nice gambit but no cigar. I'll be back to that one.

"You taught in a Catholic school until you were 29 years old, in 1980; and you "dropped religion" a few years later. So, that's about thirty years ago, right? That's a long time ago, Steve. One could wonder why you maintain such animosity after all these years, and why you expend so much time and energy energy expressing that animosity. Why can't you find it in your heart to say, "Religion is not my thing," and then drop it and focus your energy elsewhere? Why not try some positive endeavor, rather than spending your time attacking what others hold sacred?"

Because religion does not deserve a comfort zone. It has done too much damage and has stunted too much human endeavour.

"I'm sure you "dropped religion" for valid reasons. Sometime in their late teens or during their twenties, people go through a "crisis of faith" where they have to decide to accept or reject the faith they were brought up with. My four children all rejected the Catholic faith, but they don't harbor any animosity toward it like the animosity that seems to govern so much of your life.

Maybe something bad happened to you in a Catholic institution. I wouldn't blame you for "dropping religion" for that, either. Some people do bad things, even within the context of religion - but most religious people do nothing harmful in the name of their religion, so it's unfair to attack religion based on the misconduct of some believers."

Lost to you in all my verbiage are a number of references to the fact that nothing bad ever happened to me (except that I had to waste thirty-odd years saying prayers to nobody). How kind of you to project your psychological skills on to me. Unfortunately, there's nothing in it. A bit like calling me a prostitute. You could have checked, but I'm not bitter.

"If you attack what is sacred to me, you attack me."

Well then, isn't it a shame that we no longer have heresy laws. You really haven't worked out yet what exactly I'm attacking, have you, in spite of my explaining it so many times among all my verbiage? And you use of "sacred" is getting tedious.

"So, no, I wouldn't dream of defending my faith to you."

I don't want you to and never have done. But I challenge you to defend the practice of lying to children on the grounds that it's better than telling them the plain truth. If you don't rise to it, I won't die exactly.

[I notice that I've just edited out two more " sacred" references...]. :-)

"I consider your continued attacks to be highly offensive, so I speak out against those attacks on occasion."

But you don't regard calling me a prostitute or playing the amateur psychologist without first checking your facts to be offensive. Religion needs to be put under constant attack because it isn't true and it does a good deal of harm. I'm rather tempted to put you on a Christian pedestal in order to knock you off it, just like pete does to atheists and scientists (which I note, incidentally, that you're very indulgent towards), but, at the end of the day, and of this over-long post, we're all flawed human beings who need to cast out a plank or two. And I think that's rather Christian of me actually. And stop getting offended. If your faith is really so strong you should be able to laugh off people like me.