When my friends and I were around 10 years old, I had a friend who was pretty sure that when she turned 11, an owl from Hogwarts would come. We all loved Harry Potter and knew the books practically word-for-word. I knew they weren't real, but at the same time in the back of my mind I had a little fun in knowing none of us could prove we weren't just Muggles and JK Rowling was the one person who was getting away with blowing the wizarding world's cover.

Even though my friends and I accepted the reality of Harry Potter to varying degrees, and less and less as we got older, the books stayed the same, and we all agreed they were wonderful.

I'm not trying to say believing in god is like taking a children's fiction book as fact, but I think there's a lot of value in books like the Bible and the Quaran no matter how literally you take them. For the most part, it seems to me like religion is a set of guidelines, advice, and rules from all the people who came before me on how to live well. Whatever their idea of living well is, chances are it's not going to be so different from mine that we'd have nothing to talk about.