simont | Strange email

I had an odd email this weekend. Someone mailed me about a couple of minor points on my website, and then added at the end of the message that he found it curious that I hadn't written anything about religion. He said, in particular, that he thought knowing something about what I believed in that area might, in his words, ‘shed some light on an important aspect of [my] personality’.

Well, I was willing enough to answer his question in private email. It's true that I've never bothered to mention on my main website that I'm an atheist, but that's not out of any strong feeling that it's Nobody Else's Business; partly it's because I'd expect any such mention to attract too much email flamage to be worth the trouble, but mostly I've just never felt that I had anything particularly interesting or original to say on the subject. (And if I did, it would more likely be a vague musing to mention in passing in this diary, rather than something to publish on my permanent website as a Serious Essay intended to attract ongoing widespread interest.)

But it struck me as particularly strange that someone might feel their understanding of me as a person was noticeably incomplete without knowing my religion. I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find there are people whose religion is responsible for significant aspects of their personality (e.g. if their personality changed noticeably when they converted). And I certainly know there are people who at least believe their religion is the most important thing about them: I occasionally come across LJ bios saying faintly nauseating things like ‘The most important fact about me is that I love God’, or ‘I'm a Fooist, and once you know that, you know everything you need to about me’. (My general feeling tends to be that if they say everything else about them is even less interesting than their religion, I'm willing to take their word for it.)

But it's always seemed to me that such people are a small minority: for the most part I wouldn't have said there was any particularly noticeable divide of personality between the various theists and atheists I know. So when I meet somebody new, I've never felt a particular need to know about their religion, beyond finding out whether or not they're the sort of person who makes an overwhelmingly big deal of it. Sometimes I've managed to know people for years before finding out that they've been a devout Fooist all along and I'd never known – and once I've blinked a couple of times, it generally alters my attitude to them not one jot.

Am I unusual in this? Does anyone else round here feel that their understanding of someone's personality is necessarily (or even usually) incomplete without some knowledge of their attitude to religion?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

FWIW I have the same reaction. More specifically, I suspect that he wants to be rude about atheism at Simon but doesn't feel that he can do so until he's got an actual admission of atheism from him, and that he is slightly resentful that he hasn't :-).

Yeah, that sounds likely. I think livredor described it best. (Although I'll offer 5-1 on the reverse evangelism from a militant atheist who wants to be rude at Simon for being religious :))

Since several people have speculated as to his motives: he turned out to be an atheist himself, and apart from very tentatively wondering if the cause of general rationalism might be advanced by people like me being willing to declare atheism publicly, he mostly just seemed to want to chat about it.

(I'm posting this same response at about five places in the comments to this post. Suddenly I wish LJ had a means of re-merging lots of branches of a threaded discussion in some way...)

Ah, that's interesting. Thank you for following up (I was going to ask if anything further happened, but expected the conversation would likely fizzle). Maybe we are too cynical, it's strange, but seems fairly nice.

Suddenly I wish LJ had a means of re-merging lots of branches of a threaded discussion in some way...)

Yeah, I'll definitely put that on the list for LJ/news 2.0 :) The feature I had envisaged was to be able to cross-post or flag a comment as if it were a rely to another post/comment, so you can (a) make a comment and say "Hey, X, you might be interested", (b) reply to several comments as one (c) make a post that's also a reply to a previous post, so people who have both on the friends list see one post about a meme, and several more as replies, but anyone with only the second on the friendslist see that as the post, with further as replies. (In some ways merging blogs back into threads, newsgroups and messageboards?)

I think the currently accepted method is to post the full comment once, and then make a shorter comment to other people (or the same comment, then delete it), so all the further replies go to that comment.

I've seen people do it by making a whole new post about the outcome of whatever they were discussing in their previous post.

Th downside of your way is that it means that people who are stalking the thread get five copies of the follow-up in their email.

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