I read the interesting piece by Farish A Noor ('Reaching out - gays and Islam', July 9). What he interpreted was a valiant attempt at adapting traditional religious thoughts to existing modern realities, but it is untenable from strict religious perspectives (whether Islamic or Christianity).

From those perspectives, homosexuality/ liwat is a moral disease - HIV/Aids is a medical one.

When a homosexual contracts HIV/Aids, it is just God's punishment for being unnatural and morally diseased. The first cause of the medical disease is the moral disease that has to be first eliminated. So if they perish at the margins, that is the way it should be.

To bring them within the folds of a religious community's acceptance and compassion - because they are its "actual lived realities" - is to risk the spread of that moral disease/decadence amongst others at the peril of that community.

True, the existence of religion has not precluded the existence of gays, but by keeping them at the periphery (underground) and not recognising their membership of the faith, their numbers are not allowed to proliferate beyond their existing levels so as to spread wider the moral disease that in turn aggravates the medical one to the detriment of the larger community.

On God's all-encompassing Mercy and Compassion, they are not limited in respect of forgiving normal natural human foibles, but this is inapplicable in a different inexcusable context when a reproachful and morally corrupt soul:

a) commits (say) murder or rape; or

b) worships Satan or commits an act like homosexuality that goes against the natural order of heterosexuality as God created and intended.

Surely it will be straining the argument to say that God's compassion and Mercy are so boundless that they extend to these very cases, which, by religious definition, are so depraved as to deserve mortal and divine punishment.

It is not a question of limits - for there is none - but Mercy and Compassion need not, and should not be extended to cases of such irredeemable punishable depravity.

Western secular thinking will proscribe the cases under category (a) because they inflict harm unto significant others but not (b) because the element of harm to others (other than self) is not evident, and in the case of homosexuality, may be even excused on grounds that the acts are consensual and represent an inclination either biologically determined or an acquired predilection.

Religious thinking proceeds on a different line from that of the secular. The former is structured on moral precepts independent of secular western concepts evaluating 'harm', 'free will as against determinism', etc. Religious moral precepts are assumed a priori true in the language of the absolute because they are pre-ordained divine truth that by definition transcends rational debate based on western logic.

There are various gradations in the continuum of sins, and homosexuality being unnatural is at the extreme end of unmitigated depravity of which there can be no redemption.

I am of the opinion that in religious discourse, there is no space at all for arguments of a clever nature as that put forward by the esteemed Farish.

To question why homosexuals should, in the light of God's Mercy and Compassion, be outcast when their actual lived realities is tantamount to questioning the truth of the religion itself and its many other edicts and symbols.

There are many other depraved sins as well (besides homosexuality) that are actual lived realities - all their perpetrators to be saved because of the Almighty's all-encompassing Mercy and Compassion?

It is, however, a good try, and, may I add, for a good cause, but it won't work!