Combat and derision are so unsatisfying. Yet that's the whole tenor of Joe Offer's bitter and frustrated post. I suppose, as an aside, that I ought to congratulate him for producing a post that contains a world-record population density of the word "sacred."

And in many ways that's the point. In the good old days Joe's mob would have had me, Musket, Jim, Jack and Greg dragged to court for heresy. They can't do that now, of course, so they have to think of other ways of defending their religion. Joe's post reveals two time-honoured methods. First, wrap up your faith in a cloak of sacredness and tell us how offensive we're being to those who hold this, that and the other sacred. Why, it would be as bad as if gangs of us stood on street corners and shouted at every passing mother that her baby was execrably ugly. How dare we! Second, tell us over and over and over again that we shouldn't criticise what we don't understand, as if we were all dull-witted dolts. Unfortunately, Joe, we understand you all too well. Reflect that observers from the outside might just see you for what you really are better than how you see yourself. Worse, one or two of us have been both within and without. You don't like that one little bit and you've had another go at me for that in my post. I suppose you're going to tell me that, after two millennia of Christianity, things have changed so much in one generation that I can't possibly have any inkling of how things are. Bullshit, Joe, and you know it. What I know makes you uncomfortable, that's more like it.

Finally, your faux soft-centred philosophical ramblings about what isn't really literal is lifted straight from your theology classes. I remind you once again that very few Catholics are privy to that thinking. School and pulpit teaching, which is what most Catholics get and no more, hardly spend much time delving critically into such niceties, do they? Ignorance or confusion serves the Church far better. About everything, contraception, abortion, creation, what's literal and what isn't...