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...)