If that position is to make sense, it must be that they regard Jewishness as a cultural category. One could obviously be culturally Jewish without following the Jewish religion, because there is more to Jewish culture than the Jewish religion (although the boundary lines are rather hard to identify). Of course that's a big simplification, because there are many different Jewish cultures, but still.
If they mean that Jewishness is not about culture or religion, but a purely biological category, then that's not supportable. Jewishness can't itself be a race because there are Jews of many different races. That's why antisemitism (in the sense of prejudice against Jews) is not a form of racism.
I'm glad of that at least: and indeed even though I may often appear impatient I'm glad to have the occasion to try to put my thoughts in order, unconvincing as the result may often appear.
That may be true, but I don't really see why it's relevant to what we were talking about (whatever it was).
This is obviously true, but it applies at the social level as well - a society may think it would behave in a certain way in a certain situation, but in the event it doesn't. In fact this disjunction probably underlies various national myths, such as the myth that during the Blitz everyone in London was terribly calm and stoic and good-natured, when in fact they were all running around panicking, looting shops, and crushing each other to death in Tube stations. But that's not how the British like to think they would behave.
You can still consider such cases and accurately report your intuitions about them, though, can't you? That's the sole purpose of thought experiments. They are supposed to be concrete examples to think about and consider what your intuitions are. That gives you the data from which you can extrapolate your general intuitions.
Anyway, again I'm not really clear on how we got into this or why it's relevant.
Well then, what did you mean when you said that "An agnost[ic] should know better, though, than to point a moral finger"? Can you rephrase this in a non-metaphorical way?
You keep using the term "scientific fact". I don't know what you mean by that. Do you mean a claim that can be established by the scientific method of hypothesis and experiment? But there are plenty of claims that can't be established in that way - such as historical claims, or subjective ones such as "I don't like cheese" - and we don't normally have a problem accepting such claims as meaningful or even true. Now the claim "Julian of Norwich had a vision of the crucified Christ" cannot be established or tested by the scientific method, but then neither can the claim "Caesar crossed the Rubicon". So I don't really see what your objection is to claims about religious experiences - they are no more or less problematic, as established phenomena, than any other historical occurrences.
Besides this, there are obviously other features of the world, apart from religious experiences, that theists have used to rationally ground theism. And some of these features are things that have been established by the scientific method, such as the operation of certain physical laws or the identification of certain constants in physics. Some theists have argued that the best explanation for these features is the existence of God. Whether that's a good argument or not needn't detain us here - the point is that that is a way of basing a religious claim upon scientific facts in this sense.
Now here you seem to be using a completely different definition of "scientific fact", to mean a claim that is consistent with well-established scientific theories. Taken in that sense, most of what you say here is reasonable. But it's confusing to switch from one definition to another like this. So I'm not really sure precisely what you're trying to say.
That's a bit simplistic! There are rather a lot of forms that religion takes apart from raving fundamentalism and vague deism, you know. Such as mainstream Christianity, or indeed most other mainstream religions. Where, for example, would you place someone like Rowan Williams in your scheme?
