I agree I would hope it's not the overwhelmingly only aspect of you, but on the other hand, it's one of the things I would naturally expect to know about someone I thought I knew well. It probably tells you about their general beliefs, and is the sort of thing that would come up.

To me, the very strange thing is why he did expect to know anything about your personality. Your website is, surely, to talk about interesting things. If you read it, you may learn something about who you are as a software designer and a little about who you are as a mathematician. Why should anyone need to know anything about you personally, unless you happen to feel you want to talk about it?

Well, there is an "about me" page on there, which is vaguely intended to give people some idea of what I'm like as a person in case they want to know. (It could do with some serious rewriting, admittedly.) So if one were to think that religion was a vitally important thing to know about somebody, it wouldn't seem completely unreasonable for one to be surprised that my "about me" page is silent on the subject.

Yeah, that would make sense. In fact, I think it would fit perfectly well in the "about you" page, but by no means be necessary.

I get the feeling this correspondent suspects he knows your religious inclination and wants to talk about it for some reason, but don't know why.

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.

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...)