"I guess Mr. Shaw was conditioned as a child to see faith only as ideology, and that's too bad."

Guess again. As it happens, my Catholic upbringing was informal, even casual. Not a great start though. A Catholic primary school that wouldn't let us play with the Protestant kids from the school a hundred yards down School Street. Teachers and priests who told us that heaven contained only baptised Catholics. Much concentration on the classification of sins, the wrong kinds of confession and conscience and guilt by the bucketload. Springing people out of purgatory by saying three Hail Marys in an empty church if you chose the right day. Hellfire for eating meat on Fridays until a certain date, after which you could do what you liked. A secondary school that I was sent to, in spite of a bloody long bus journey, because it had a "good reputation," even though there was a perfectly good non-Catholic alternative just down the road. Perish the thought! When I look back, I realise now that the school was run by a bunch of bigoted, narrow-minded Salesian sad cases. But I was soon able to truant from Sunday Mass and go instead to the local dodgy back-street dive with all the other miscreants. Now that WAS an education. But there was no ostracism for slipping away from the faith, no fatwa. Not everyone forced into a religion at birth is so lucky.

" I see bringing kids up in a church as bringing them up in a tradition, a tradition that celebrates and explores birth, death, and life and the events of life according to a treasured tradition and set of rituals."

There is absolutely nothing special about Catholicism with regard to those things. I like tradition myself, but tradition needs to be questioned. We don't like traditional street dancers blacking up, even though the practice is rooted in tradition. We don't hang people in public or sacrifice goats, all honoured traditions. We ridicule people who declare that the woman's place is in the home, but a hundred years ago you'd have taken that to be a sage aphorism.

"My own Catholic upbringing had little to do with ideology. It was growing up in an interesting, rich tradition that I enjoyed - and I received an exceptionally good (and critical) education in the practices of that tradition and the reasoning behind those practices."

Education is giving people the skills to acquire knowledge and to seek what is really true. Your tradition is predicated on a tenet that is almost certainly false, that God exists. An "education" built on that foundation isn't an education at all. there are more appropriate words for it.

"A tradition that you choose as an adult because it's tailored to your needs, just doesn't feel authentic to me..."

If it's tailored to your needs, it isn't a tradition.

As for viewing miracles with scepticism, I don't. Miracles are simply not true. Scepticism means you are open to persuasion, given that further information may be provided. Well that doesn't speak well for your education. Miracles are a big lie. A proper education teaches you to reject such stupidity, along with ghosts, apparitions of the Virgin and telepathy. An education that let's you um and ahh about miracles is seriously flawed.

As for half a dozen people jumping around criticising you, well that's exactly what you do to me! Let's face it, Joe. A revival of those heresy laws would suit you very well!