"Er ... ye-es."
"Well, I don't understand. How did he for my sins? I hadn't been born when he died."
Bringing up four children is difficult enough, I imagine, without them posing theological riddles while you're turning the fish fingers or chan
ging a nappy. So -
"Oh, I don't know," said my mum.
And while she might have been trying not to bias me on the question of whether or not religion was codswallop, I was left in no doubt that she thought it was.
And, given that she was right about everything in my eyes, that had to mean that what I was taught in school about Jesus and sin was questionable to say the least.
Nothing since that day 27 years ago has persuaded me otherwise.
I raised this with my mum the other day, while Zoe played with figurines from an old nativity set that always gets brought out at my parents' house at this time of year. (This should tell you that my parents wear their atheism lightly, which is to say hypocritically.)
"I don't think we ever told you there was no God," she said.
"You might not have meant to, but I could tell what you thought.
"Anyway, I wonder what I should tell Zoe about Christmas when she starts to ask?"
"You'll have to tell her about the nativity story," counselled Mum.
"Let her be as religious as she likes. Little girls often have a religious phase. I remember going around the house with a prayer book, making my parents join in singing hyms. But don't tell her about hell. Oh - and don't go overboard on Easter either."
She didn't mean chocolate; she meant stories of betrayal, torture, nails, crosses and flaying.
It's not the only bit of advice I've received on this subject recently. My colleague Margaret Watson warnend me against filling Zoe's young head with Godless thoughts.
Margaret's dad died when she was nine, and her faith was a great comfort for her, because she could believe that he was waiting for her in heaven.
"And, being Catholic," she said, "It meant that there was still someone I could call Father."
I can't argue with that. You'd have to be a brutally militant atheist to tell an orphaned child that we die and that's it.
That Margaret was nine when she lost her father had a particular resonance for me because nine was the most difficult age of my life. Nothing bad happened. Nobody died. But I did a lot of thinking and came up against the immovable object of mortality.
You have to face thoughts of death at some point.
But if nine years old might be a bit too early, two definately is.
And so I'll take the path of pragmatic hypcrisy when Zoe's old enough to ask, and tell her that yes, when we die, we go to heaven.
I can appreciate that religion is a comfort for childre, a romantic fantasy, like Father Christmas.
But while this might be a strong argument in favour of religion for children, it's also, by implication, an argument against it for adults.
