Hi Asadullah — It took me slightly longer than 24 hours in the end, I'm afraid. But as promised, here's a more detailed reply.

Firstly, I want to thank you for your kind words. I'm really glad you found the review interesting,

To address your various points:

Yes, I am careful about archiving past work. The most care I take is with my short stories and novels. At every stage, these are written offline in Word, then saved to a USB, then backed up in "the cloud", then emailed to myself, with an off site backup sent to my mother to store on her computer. This is a daily process. I also print off a copy. One cannot be too careful with these. I'm a bit less "belt and braces" with the articles I write here, or my film reviews, but these are still backed up elsewhere.

The Hans Zimmer score is good, I grant you. I tend to prefer John Williams to Zimmer (I prefer more melodic film scoring, and am a bit old school in that way), but Zimmer has written some fine things, especially for Christopher Nolan (and recently, for Denis Villeneuve's remarkable Dune films).

I think your description of me as "more religious" 20 years ago is essentially accurate. My faith in God hasn't changed, but in my mind, being "religious" isn't a good thing. In fact, I consider "religion" something of an unholy trinity with politics and economics as a means to control and oppress. I find the true message of Jesus Christ to be the complete opposite. At no point did he tell the disciples to conquer militarily, or overthrow political systems, or to force anyone to be Christian, under threat of torture and death. Yet look what happened after the Constantine reformation: What Satan couldn't achieve by persecuting Christians and feeding them to lions, etc, he was able to achieve by making Christianity the state religion, and making it politically correct to be a Christian. The subsequent two thousand or so years of church history is awash with terrible deeds as a result - from the Crusades (which resulted in all sorts of horrible massacres, including the deaths of Muslims, Jews, and others), to the Spanish Inquisition (I don't really see burning people alive for "heresy" in the teaching of Jesus, do you?), to the antisemitism in the Reformation (lots of Christians praise Martin Luther, but his writings about the Jews are bone-chilling, and probably sowed the seeds of Hitler's justification of the Holocaust), to the Ku Klux Klan and other assorted vile racism against Black people in America, and so on. You get the idea.

At the same time, a study of church history also reveals God working quietly behind the scenes with good people, despite such catastrophes. It's a bit like the way Gandalf talks about small everyday good deeds by ordinary people keeping evil in check. I think God uses ordinary people in the same way. True Christianity is very simple: Having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, believing in his once and for all sacrifice for sins. I don't believe good works can save anybody, but a simple belief that Jesus took on himself the penalty for all the sins of the world, and that he died and rose again, is at the core of my beliefs. I know I've done plenty of bad things, and I'm grateful Jesus paid the price for them.

So what is my responsibility now? It's very simple: Try to be an ambassador of Jesus Christ in the world and show his love and compassion to others. I don't believe Christians should go around twisting anyone's arm or trying to aggressively convert them, nor do I believe I have to defend God (hence why I really don't care how many things like The Da Vinci Code crop up these days). But I do believe God draws people to him, and I hope I can point the way. A bit like Morpheus in The Matrix: "I can only show you the door. You have to walk through it."

Coming back to The Da Vinci Code, I am anti-censorship to the marrow of my bones and don't believe in censoring or banning anything, no matter how blasphemous or offensive it may be (to any faith, not just Christianity). A good library will have something in it to offend everyone, I think. What's more, I no longer care about "defending God", as I say, because in my experience, God has a habit of revealing truth to people who are earnestly seeking him in any case. I don't need to insert myself into that process by yelling hysterically about how blasphemous something is. In a fallen world, I don't believe any political leader or group, or religious leader or group, or corporate body and their various billionaire CEOs for that matter, have any right to dictate what people can and can't read/watch/think. Human beings are fallible, and the best we can hope for (at least, until Jesus Christ returns, as I believe he will), is tolerance and peace. Therefore, I don't believe in censorship at all. Find something offensive? Don't read it or watch it or whatever. That's your personal freedom. But don't try to dictate to others what they can and cannot do. Again, see church history for how disastrous that can be.

That, incidentally, is also why what I see in America troubles me so much. There are so many evangelical Christians there who seem to have swallowed the Donald Trump Kool-Aid, idolatrously assuming him to be some kind of Chosen One destined to bring about a theocracy that is fundamentally opposed to the principles of tolerance that I just outlined. A US Christian theocracy would probably be no better than the Taliban, in that respect. The hypocrisy is outrageous.

I'm sorry to have gone on at such length, but I wanted to give you a full explanation of my position on such things. I was quite moved by the trust you place in me by telling me about your spiritual journey and honestly admitting your mental health struggles and how God has saved you from near suicide attempts (which I believe he did, by the way). I have been praying for you over the last couple of days, and I sincerely hope this message finds you well and happy. And as I said before, my invitation stands: If you are ever in southwest England, lets meet up, go for drinks, and put the world to rights together (and maybe watch a film or two as well). :)