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Holly has a fascination with religion, yet she doesn't believe it's true.
Still, she keeps coming back to religious questions.

This morning (fifteen minutes ago) she was lying on the floor of my office
looking up at shelves.

"What's 'The Old Schoolhouse'?"

"A magazine about homeschooling by fundamentalist Christians."

"What's 'fundamentlist'?"

"They believe the Bible is literally true and that everything they need to
know is in there and they live just by the Bible."

"Does the Bible say anything about keeping your kids home from school, or
about sending them to school?"

"No, but it says things they interpret to be about school, so they quote that
about homeschooling. Other people find verses to use to tell kids they need
to go to school."

"Will you read me the whole Bible."

"Sure. Now? I think I have one right in here." I did. I asked if I should
start with the best parts or just start at the beginning.

She ignored that, and said "Are you going to trick me and read Lord of the
Rings?"

"Don't you think you would know the difference?"

"I don't know."

So I started out with Genesis 1:1, and by 1:2, she said, "That's how Lord of
the Rings starts! And there were dwarves and elves..." I said, "Well, the
*movie* does" and she laughed because she doesn't watch the movies
either--the's very LotR resistent.

But she did have a literary point, if she was thinking of the Galadriel
voiceover at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring.


So I read on. She said "What's 'hethem'?" and she said it to sound quite a
bit like "heathen," and I explained that it was ". . .created he them," and
did some rearrangement of words so she could get the grammar. I continued.

"So God spoke English?"

"ight?"

I knew I'd never get past the first page. She was already frustrated that
God has been misquoted. The King James-worshiping fundamentalists would not
have understood her objections.

After "moveth" and "creepeth," Holly said, "HEY, that's like that game!" And
by that, she meant the Strongbad parody of Zarg, which sayseth everythingeth
in very-bad parody of 17th centuryest Englisheth
(http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail94.html, "Thy Dungeonman").

In one repetitive place she said, "Hey, this is like poetry, but it doesn't
rhyme."

"Maybe it did in Hebrew."

"Well poetry that doesn't rhyme is the worst kind."

And once she said "You wrote this!" and she pointed to the front of the
Bible, which sure enough had my name in gold, right on the front, so I told her,
"Yeah, I guess I did."

When I got to "dominion" over things she asked what that meant. I said it
meant we owned them, that we were kings over animals and could tell them what to
do (thinking "yeah, like things that creepeth are going to listen").

Holly says, "And yet we're not king of the forest!?"

So at the end of the sixth day, that was the end of the first chapter and I
said so. She said, "That was a short chapter. Wait, I thought it was divided
into books."

"Yeah, Genesis is a book, and it has fifty chapters. When you want to tell
someone something particular, you tell them which book, chapter and verse," and
I showed her.

That was enough Bible for her for today.

She might or might not come back for more, but she made more intelligent
comments and asked more questions that actually meant something than some people
would be willing to ask in a year of Sunday School. And she made connections
with Lord of the Rings, homeschooling, language, journalistic integrity,
Strongbad, poetry and the Wizard of Oz.

So it goes.

Sandra