Haha! I appreciate your willingness to talk about the issue. It can be hard sometimes to see eye to eye, but really seeing eye to eye is not important - understanding the philosophical can open our minds and our hearts in many ways.

First I would encourage you to try to be open to a symbolic interpretation of these topics - I will try to walk through one such interpretation now.

Today it is accepted that man is an evolved creature, that evolved from a shared relative to modern day apes. Man is a beast, or was at least. We have instincts, and opposeable thumbs, but we also have something more. Rational thought, maybe, a concience - perhaps! Even athiests say they are humanists - I'm not sure animals would consider themselves zebraists or lionists or anything more than survivalists.

So humans have that something more - and throughout our largely oral development of philosophy we have created ways of communicating the decision to reject or leave behind the animalistic, 'all-for-me', greedy survival instinct, and instead to accept the divine christ inside of ourselves - the very same something more that makes us humans and not beasts.

There is no need to literally talk to bearded man in the clouds for this to be true, God may be a woman, He may have shaved today, he may be an equilateral triangle - he is not actually a person like you and me, He is a symbol.