I have discussed this subject with many of my former classmates, and most of them did accept what we were taught--the Resurrection, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the whole ball of Catholic wax--and changed their views only after a long period of questioning and adult disillusionment with the Roman Catholic Church.

I should say that I am very grateful for my Catholic education. Because the teachings seemed so nonsensical to me, I began to read the Bible for myself (something not encouraged by Catholic educators at the time) when I was about 11 years old.

Eventually, I looked into other religions. In all of them--including liberal forms of Protestantism that had dispensed with most of the supernatural stories I found so unconvincing--I found only more illogic.

I did, however, discover the magnificence of the King James Bible, which has been superceded in America's dumbed-down culture by modern translations that have removed most of the beauty and grandeur from this great work of English literature. Somehow, "God is my guide; I don't need anything else" doesn't quite have the ring of, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want."

So, I have the nuns to thank for my discovery of the Bible--a great work written by men, which makes it much greater than it would be if the verses had been dictated by some supernatural being. It's not necessary to believe in the literal truth of the Bible to appreciate the authors' insights into human nature or the beauty of the language as rendered by the 17th-century English translators.

There is another peculiar twist to my religious history. My father, Robert Jacoby, was a convert to Catholicism but was born a Jew--something I did not know until I was around age 18, when I figured it out for myself. Of course, nearly everyone named Jacoby has a Jewish family tree. Many friends in New York have asked me how it was possible for someone not to know that Jacoby was a Jewish name, but it was quite possible in the Michigan town where I grew up. There were few Jews in Lansing, and I did not (knowingly) know any of them.

This story is told at length in my 2000 memoir, "Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past," which is now out of print and available only on used book websites but which I hope will be reissued next year.

In my late teens, I spent a fair amount of time looking at Judaism as an alternative to Christianity but soon found that I was a secularist, an atheist, and a freethinker through and through. The Passover story, in which God delivers his chosen people from slavery by killing off each first-born Egyptian son is as repulsive to me as the Christianized New Testament version, Herod's slaughter of the innocents. If I believed in such a God, I would truly know despair.

There was no particular point at which I stopped believing in God, no moment of revelation. The truth is that I cannot remember a time when I did believe wholeheartedly in anything I was told about religion. I must have believed at some point, but only as a child believes in Santa Claus. My first serious memories about religion date from the period when I began reading the Bible--and I began reading the Bible because I was already a religious skeptic.

I am always astonished when well-meaning people tell me they are sorry for me because I do not believe in God. They have to ponder the unanswerable question of why their God allows terrible things to happen to His creatures. When terrible things happen, I see them either as acts of nature or as acts of human nature. What human beings can do, human beings can undo--as slavery and human sacrifice have been largely undone, thanks not to gods but to the capacity of men and women to overcome the darkness in their own natures. Our own natures.