For what it's worth, Tony, I've been on your side all along and find your position eminently reasonable. How anyone can defend Craibe's position is beyond me. I wonder if Graham gives radical Moslems that much latitude of interpretation of their hate-speak?
I'm also interested in Graham's take on Paradise Lost--seems rather an eclectic reading for a formalist..
And "trolling"; I'm fascinated with this concept too. It seems to me a populist stigma intended to censor and ultimately purge social media of critical thinkers--already an endangered species.
Keep up the good work, Tony.

Dear Graham Y,

You wrote: "Dan, there is a long tradition in the Christian and Jewish faiths of regarding creation as an allegory. Wikipedia has some interesting information on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of_Genesis."

There is such a long tradition. However, there have been schools established in the United States, the UK, Australia and Israel which disregard that tradition. They substitute literal interpretation of scripture for evolutionary biology or teach science and Creationism in tandem. In spite of court decisions that teaching Creationism in place of evolutionary biology violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution state legislatures in the US keep passing laws to get around those decisions. Do you know of any effort by the mainstream Christian churches to support teaching of natural science on a strictly scientific basis in the schools?

A friend of mine who is a professor of zoology told me he thought 20% of his students were Creationists but know evolutionary biology well enough to pass exams in the subject. Their aim appears to be to get credentials as biology teachers and then actually teach Creationism.

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Religious belief, or faith, is a double edged sword.

On one edge, it is a source of hope and comfort in times of woe and severe distress for all those who are struggling to face up to the harshness and rigour of their daily lives. For the more privileged members of society, it is, additionally, a source of inspiration and a means of expression for their existentialist aspirations.

On the other edge, as Marx astutely observed, it is a valuable political tool in subduing the masses into acceptance of their daily trials and tribulations as their rightful merit. It is an important contributing factor in the maintenance of peace and social order. It is what he described as "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people", an expression borrowed from the Marquis de Sade's 1797 novel, L'Histoire de Juliette, which was echoed by the German philosopher Novalis who wrote, at about the same time as Sade: "Their so-called religion acts merely as an opiate, irritating, numbing, calming their pain out of weakness".

There appears to be no consensus among historians as to the historical value of the bible. At best, it is considered to be incomplete. Its value appears to be more of a cultural nature.

Nor does the bible appear to be the source of religious belief or faith but rather a support for such belief. Religious belief or faith seems to have its origins in custom and tradition, handed down, generation after generation, possibly synchronizing favourably with genetic receptors located in the temporal lobes of the human brain, as posited recently by a number of eminent cognitive neuroscience researchers.

In this sense, the faculty to believe in a protective creator would appear to be an attribute of nature for the assurance, comfort and survival of the human species.

As for the significance of the interpretation by devotees of what are held to be holy Scriptures, this should, perhaps, also be placed in the aforementioned context.

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Of course, Dan S de Merengue...

>>Pericles, Correct me if I'm wrong...<<

Happy to oblige, as always.

>>...but I've interpreted your answer to Rosner's question as such: "To what end is my sense of justice and my yearning for transcendence, and so on, in purely evolutionary terms?" You say to no end, as evolution has no goal or purpose. Therefore we are mistaken to think such feelings serve any purpose<<

The evolutionary purpose of our having a sense of justice is that it is a survival mechanism. From the basic fight/flight reactions of animals have developed processes that allow us to live communally without killing each other too often. Our "sense of justice" is a manifestation of precisely those evolved systems.

It is not appropriate for me to comment on Mr Rosner's "yearning for transcendence", but it does sound quite unpleasant. I doubt very much if it is a product of evolution, unless by way of a feeling of inadequacy, or perhaps paranoia, both of which are more likely to be caused by his personal interactions with his fellow humans.

We have evolved into beings with a higher level of rationality than, say, a slug. To this end, those feelings of awe do indeed serve an evolutionary purpose, which is to encourage in those who experience it, a need to share it. The ultimate in sharing is of course reproduction, in which case the genes of those who retain a non-slug-like sense of wonder at the universe around them are more likely than not, to breed.

Evolutionary purpose duly fulfilled.

Tony, there is no point arguing with you. The point was whether Craibe was arguing that homosexuals should be killed, and he wasn't. You acknowledge that. The rest is waffle designed to try to hide the fact that you do acknowledge that.

DavidF, I went to a Catholic high school run by Augustinian priests. We were taught evolution as a fact. As I recall it there was only one creationist in my school class, and we thought him very odd. Does that meet your criteria an "effort by the mainstream Christian churches to support teaching of natural science on a strictly scientific basis in the schools". I think you will find that the same is true for every mainstream denominational school in Australia today.

Apologies Dan S de Merengue, I forgot the other half of your interpretation, which is equally erroneous, but in an entirely different manner.

>>You say to no end, as evolution has no goal or purpose<<

Of course evolution has a "purpose". The entire evolutionary process has the purpose of survival, as in favouring those variations that are "better adapted for their immediate, local environment".

>>Therefore we are mistaken to think such feelings serve any purpose<<

Are we?

Surely it is possible to theorize - although very difficult to prove, in our short lifespan - that those of us who experience non-slug-like feelings of awe, or the conviction that justice is, on balance, a Jolly Good Thing, are better equipped, genetically speaking, to handle our lives on earth, and therefore more likely to transmit those genes downstream, as it were.

It makes a great deal of sense to me that those of us with the finer feelings of wonder, and justice, and good-heartedness, and charity, are so endowed as a result of millennia of natural selection.

But it is also intriguing to imagine what possible "purpose" can be ascribed to a God who creates a planet, one among a possible gazillion, it should be noted, only to populate it with people who are forever fighting amongst themselves.

How will he know when he has succeeded in his "purpose"?