It's all relatives

Abstract

I have a very Catholic mother and a very Atheist father. Not to mention other relatives, who span the rainbow of Taoist, Wiccan, Born-again Christian and Jewish. This, gentle readers, in no way creates the basis for a straightforward relationship with spirituality. My childhood surfed a weird tension between Mum's efforts to ensure I was baptised and sent to an all-girls Catholic school run by nuns, and Dad's efforts to ensure I read Isaac Asimov (founder of the Committee for Sceptical Inquiry) and was well versed in the sciences, histories and anthropology. I experienced some wipe-outs, pulled down by the undertow of Christian guilt about my sexuality, and yet also slamming painfully against rock of reason on the question of my own mortality. Sometimes I wonder how my parents managed to so seamlessly maintain a happy marriage and agree on the rules by which I was raised, given their seemingly oppositional frameworks of reference for ...you know... the very nature of existence itself.