I enjoy reading Peter's exposees, and his way of making a simple statement. I wonder, if here he realised when writing the last paragraph about Moorehouse, that he not only exposed Realism as a fraud but also Religion / Christianity, which has not had a better record in preventing wars than realism.

Dear Peter, I think your comment “Evil is indelible in human nature”, sums it all up really.

Since the formation of the very first human societies this has been the case. The more complex our societies have become, the more rules we have implemented to mitigate our evil.

If we were to count the rules they would probably run into the tens of millions. We have social rules, political rules, economic rules, ecological rules, scientific rules. Many of these are legally enforceable. In addition, in the last two thousand years we have developed 34,000 registered religions and their associated rules.

This leaves us with inherent human evil versus tens of millions of human rules and the winner is?

Do you seek to insert “rationality” as probable cause of this human condition? Or is there a case that the “socialization” of rationality and subsequent rules, has become an inhibitor to human progress?

The Moorhouse conclusions related to the “deficits of rationalism” are a malicious misrepresentation. They are not deficits of rationalism at all, they are the consequences of socializing or inhibiting rationalism.

Some good meat in the middle but this all gets a bit obtuse and lacks a case or a conclusion.

Good to have you back, Mr Selleck. It's been a while.

But I see that nothing has changed. The hammer of your religion has discovered a nail of rationality in a work of fiction by an Australian author, and you have duly beaten it into the woodwork.

At least you have the courtesy to signal your intentions from the outset:

"This is more than novelised history, Moorhouse spent immense time researching the characters in his novels, almost every person is drawn from history"

With this, you have tried to prise the character of Edith Campbell Berry out of her fictional home, and give her the appearance of real life. Having achieved this, you allow yourself to treat her as a living person, and her foibles as issues that may be addressed by your condescending arm-around-the-shoulder.

"This idealism led her to cling to the League of Nations even after multiple failures in arms talks and attempts to prevent war. There is a naiveté here that is common to rationalists who believe that the world is transparent to human reason and thus changeable"

We are talking about a figment of Mr Moorhouse's imagination, Mr Selleck. A carefully constructed bundle of fictitious characteristics that the novelist uses to generate a story arc. By pretending that she was real, you allow yourself to judge her as a person...

"Edith seems to be a woman who has lost contact with human reality and replaced it with rationality. She has not understood that ideas need not refer to a reality in the world. But despite all her set backs, she clings to the rationalist faith that all is possible"

Ah, there it is - the "rationalist faith".

"In their refusal of Christian faith in the name of reason they refuse also the witness of their own hearts"

Christian faith good; rationalist faith bad. All based on the antics of a colourfully-drawn character in a work of fiction.

Could it be that you have overlooked the essential nature of novel-writing?

Altogether, an argument built on sand, with the tide due in any minute.

Pericles has beaten me to it, but my point is the same: so what? If a Catholic writes fiction that depicts rationalists in a bad light, what is this supposed to prove, exactly?

You're way past clutching at straws, Peter: now you're simply clutching at nothing and pretending there's a straw there.

PS: Any novel which depicts a 'torrid one night stand with a Canberra bureaucrat' is plainly a work of fantasy anyway.

Rationalism alone must inexorably lead to despair and chaos.

It is beginning to dawn on more and more people that if it is true that this universe has simply spontaneously come into existence without any intention or purpose then rationally assessed, ultimately there really are no rules, there is no better (or worse), and nothing really matters.