When I was a prickly atheist teenager, I did not appreciate the Battle Hymn of the Republic. After all, it was one of the bad guys’ songs in Inherit the Wind, wasn’t it? Much later, I realized — oh, it was written by an abolitionist in 1861. She was thirsty to see the fields watered with slaveowner blood. OK then. More terrible swift sword, please.

When I was a prickly atheist teenager, I was rather confident that the people who put “evolution is just a theory” stickers in all our biology books would be Good Germans if given the chance.

Turns out? I was right.

If I had foreseen that organized atheism would descend into sexism and xenophobia, then I would give myself credit. Yes, pretty much as soon as I met a convention-ful of skeptics, I found myself ill at ease with the blithe acceptance of economic injustice, and vaguely surprised by how easily the cogs of critical thinking were disengaged once the conversation moved beyond “UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees”. I should have been more upset, and sooner.

When I was a university student, I wrote a sestina in the voice of Persephone, mourning her life, with the trick ending that she’s a goth girl and wishes she had eaten more of the pomegranate seeds so that she could groove on the underworld for a longer fraction of the year. This may be indicative of my type of indulgence then.

When I was a university student, I began a novel. Like any youngster who has just discovered layering and allusion — anagrams with doctorates — I went full in, under the spell of Pale Fire and Appel’s Annotated Lolita and elective courses on hypertext fiction. I am sure the result would in many places embarrass me now, though at least I am still fond of this sample. I doubt I had the stylistic control to make all of my attempts at subversion be more than recapitulations. In retrospect, one character seems, within the strictures of a “romance” subplot, to be discovering their own asexuality. A better writer would have done more with that. And the motives of my off-screen villains now feel a bit too armchair, too intellectualized, when simple misogynist fury would suffice.

Also, I underplayed climate change, treating it as a diegetic justification for a mild surrealism, a reason for the world to be reshaped — under a spell, again, this time of Borges’ “Death and the Compass”.

You see, I finished that novel in 2008, when plenty was wrong with the world, but matters were sufficiently good for sufficiently many that it felt we could make things right, if we only worked hard.

When I was younger, I found that “Holy Writ” was habitually obscure, frequently cruel and almost always in need of an editor. Now, as we are poised to inherit the heated wind, I would add that the best reason to know the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac is to appreciate the twist ending that Wilfred Owen gave it:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.