1. I'm not sure the world works that way, but it certainly seems how human minds work. I just wanted you to be explicit about that tension.
2. An earnest one might not. But plenty let their actions, if not their words, question Christ—just as many have loved or would love the imposition of Christian theocracy, despite Christ's words (and Augustine's elaborations).
As for whether I think Christ's biography and Muhammad's are "apples to apples", I don't think you really even need to ask that, given past discussions—you know Christ is pretty near a literary saint in my personal secular humanism. But I'm not talking individual biographies, I'm talking historical and political institutions that have a lot of distance between those biographical seeds and reality.
3. I never dismissed the value of your perspective—but I'd ask that you recognize that there are both welcoming and off-putting ways of speaking your time "in the trenches" into the conversation. The off-putting is the sort of equally-patronizing tone to which I alluded.
4. Always do—but that's a Platonic lesson, for me, not a beam/mote. Because we could go round and round pointing out each other's motes and ignoring our beams, or we can just accept (as I do) that we're all ignorant of the universe's workings, at the end of the day. So I'll keep questioning my own judgment on a continuous basis, and everyone else's, too.
