Jacqi, my duck, laid the first egg of a new clutch on the 26th of December,
which happens to be my birthday. Gazing down on her muscovy manger,
it occurred to me that the egg was infertile since there were no male ducks hereabouts to stir the pot, and all of Jacqi’s metabolic labor in  producing the egg was going to be for naught. Then it struck me: Jesus also came from an unfertilized egg, which to this day remains the supreme example of parthenogenic birth. Hmmmm, thought I…. And because the 26th is so close to the 25th, and because the egg must have been forming inside Jacqi’s uterus on the 25th, it might have received some sort of holy irradiation. You never know about these things. So I named the egg Jesus and wrote His name on the shell with a ballpoint pen. Then I put It back in the nest. If It hatched, I’d be onto something big, and maybe It would even pay for Jacqi’s upkeep. But things went terribly wrong. For reasons not given us to understand, Jacqi rolled Jesus out of the nest onto the concrete courtyard, and crack!–just like that, Jesus became Humpty Dumpty–and we agnostics finally had ourselves a god.