{"id":1095,"date":"2007-01-26T08:45:37","date_gmt":"2007-01-26T12:45:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2007-01-26T08:45:37","modified_gmt":"2007-01-26T12:45:37","slug":"a-reader-writes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1095","title":{"rendered":"A reader writes"},"content":{"rendered":"

WHO ARE YOU<\/span>?<\/p>\n\n

The web suggests you provide such details. It does not say whether you are Religious or Irreligious, Conservative, Liberal or Socialist, A Darwinite, Creationist or other. It does not tell us what you majored in.<\/p>\n\n

Alan W.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Actually, there is quite a lot of autobiographical information here,<\/a> even if the visual jokes only work in Opera.<\/p>\n\n

If you can’t work out which pigeonholes to put me in, that’s fair. I can’t either, for most of your questions. In particular, I have no idea about my own political opinions. I have a strong prejudice against bullying, which drives me towards leftish opinions, and a Machiavellian view of human nature which impels me to conservatism. I am no longer a romantic. When I was, I was some kind of neoconservative.<\/p>\n\n

I am certainly not a creationist either in the narrow sense of supposing the Bible’s cosmology to be true or anything like true, or even in the broader sense of being able to imagine what a Creator might be. On the other hand, it seems to me that original sin is incontrovertible, and that the world is fallen even if there was no Fall.<\/p>\n\n

I accept the fact of evolution as I accept the fact of gravity. I am a sociobiologist in principle, but I think Richard Lewontin is the profoundest living thinker about these matters, and he thinks it’s pernicious rubbish.<\/p>\n\n

I will spend time in empty churches, though I very seldom attend services; I do my best to encourage my Christian friends, some of whom I admire greatly. I find the Bible almost impossible to read, but I love Cranmer’s prayer book. I suspect that the worthwhile meanings of a religious text only reveal themselves through a sort of inner conversation which arises after you have tried to act as if they were true. That is why I suppose both that fundamentalism is radically wrong, since these inner meanings must be different from the outer ones, and in some sense ineradicable, since, if you don’t pay close attention to the text, the conversation will never arise.<\/p>\n\n

I was thrown out of school at sixteen and never went to university at all. My intelligence is reactive, derivative and destructive as befits a journalist.<\/p>\n\n

My speech as well as my life would be more coherent if it were fitted with a backspace key.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WHO ARE YOU<\/span>? The web suggests you provide such details. It does not say whether you are Religious or Irreligious, Conservative, Liberal or Socialist, A Darwinite, Creationist or other. It does not tell us what you majored in. Alan W. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}