My mom was cool. She was really religious, catholic, if you haven’t figured that out. She was also a nurse and so, to an extent, a scientific person. She cleverly balanced both sides of her understanding of the world. As a kid I asked her, “If we came from apes, and if there’s Adam and Eve…then…???”

She said, “How do you know Adam looked just like you and me?”

Damn, that’s brilliant. The Bible isn’t to be taken literally. It’s allegorical. And yes, I did know that word as a kid. But at the time I thought it meant in the manner of an alligator.

Later she asked me a riddle. “If you line up all the men and women who ever existed how could you tell which ones were Adam and Eve?” Answer (Michael Shermer would have gotten it right away.): They’d be the ones with no belly buttons.

See? Biology and religion, hand in hand.

My parents, though supposedly taking their religion very seriously, had a playfulness about their adherence to it at home. They talked about Jesus, God, their Mother Mary and the Holy Ghost in the same manner in which they talked about elves, the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause. This made for some confusing imagery.

And in church around Christmas we heard as much about J’s resurrection as we did about his birthday.

Uh…k. See you in three days, Jesus, you know, when you rise again, when you’re three days old. Or is that Lazarus? Ok, what the hell’s going on?