Quoting you:

"A faith claim is a free choice to believe in something that can not be proven or unproven."

Okay, but it wouldn't really be a "claim," then, would it? I know I'm splitting hairs here, and if you want to believe in something for which you have no evidence, that's your business. But as we all know, people regularly try to claim (there's that word again) that their faith is the absolute truth (see the movie "Jesus Camp" for example).

"I can not accept the fact that at the end of the day all of humanity is no more than stellar dust. ... I can not accept the idea of some scumbag torturing a child and getting away with it in the ultimate sense. Let's just say that the misery entailed in the preceding causes me to hope for a just Creator."

This is all emotion-based stuff. There are many things one could hope for if one were not limited by evidence, facts, proof. Why limit your imagination to a god somebody else already thought of? Why not make up your own god or gods or aliens or time machine or Giant Justice-Meting Kitty from Neptune and then decide you'd believe it to be true?

"I choose to believe and openly admit that perhaps I am the conflicted steward of my own faith."

You're not alone in that regard. And nobody faults you for finding the possible pointlessness of human existence to be depressing. Or that some people do bad things and get away with it (see Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" for a treatise on this particular subject).

"But I must also acknowledge that if there is a Creator he has endowed me with a fully functioning sense of doubt."

Doubt could also be an evolutionary trait of our minds. After all, people with skeptical thinking skills have a survival-skill advantage over the gullible.

"Or perhaps watching my son play or taking in the way clouds move or studying good art overwhelms me at times a causes me to feel that there is something bigger at work."

You might have noticed that Goldstein mentions similar feelings in the interview. Not all overwhelming feelings and senses of wonder have to be explained away -- neither by science nor by God. Why can't these intense feelings be accepted on their own, without having to impose some cosmic structure on them to give them a pre-fab meaning?

"And yes, where religion is concerned, I believe Pinker is supremely untutored and since you didn't trot out a list of his religious credentials, I have no reason to believe otherwise."

I am sorry for not trotting out a list of his religious credentials, but since he is an extremely well-read individual who speaks at length about subjects at the very least peripherally connected to religious thought processes, I assume he is no slouch on the subject. What are your credentials, anyway? You seem to consider that an important measure, and you also seem to regard yourself as a sufficient authority to measure whether somebody else is "untutored." (Yet I still don't know what you objected to other than his analogy.)

"Also, the name calling puts you in good company with the countless other towering imbeciles who haunt these forums. So thanks."

Let's not forget who started the name-calling. It was in the subject line of your original message. My subject line was written to parrot yours, and I admitted as much the first sentence of my message.