Last week, when I thought I was simply recovering from food poisoning after eating a rare hamburger the night before (it turned out to be intestinal flu), I pampered myself by going to the movies for the first time in a year.

It was before 5:30 p.m. so I got in for only $5.50 at the Davis Theatre in Lincoln Square to catch Bill Maher’s so-called “documentary” Religulous. When Maher goes after Bible, he makes the same uneducated, fifth-grade-level observations you’ve heard all your life.

As the Chicago Tribune assesses in it’s own review of the film, “Even if you share Maher's skepticism on his subject you may wish he'd set up his straight men and women in a way that doesn't merely score the cheapest possible laughs, or return, again and again, to Maher's eye-rolling over literalist interpretations of the Bible (Adam and Eve, talking snake, Jonah and the whale, et al.)”

Maher compares the story of Jonah and the Whale to Jack and the Beanstalk, smugly wondering how any half-wit could believe such “total nonsense.”

Of course, this is a question I’ve gotten since at least high school and has long made me the source of mocking by friends, colleagues, strangers—even my step-father.

What’s really hilarious is just the other week I popped into my Walkman one of a bagful of old sermons on cassette tapes (dating from the mid-late ’90s and purchased this past July at our church’s summer family Bible conference) to hear my preacher, Richard Jordan, actually talking about me and how I had revealed to a group from church at lunch that day about colleagues of mine at the Naperville Sun newspaper who laughed at me for believing in the “tale of Jonah.”

Jordan commented, “We had a discussion this afternoon—Lisa’s a newspaper journalist in the suburbs—and she says in her occupation when she tells people she believes the Bible they go, “Agh-gaw, silly stuff! Why everybody knows that’s stupid stuff about Jonah and the whale.”

“I asked her, ‘Well, what do you say back?’’ and she answered, ‘Well, I don’t know what to say,’ and I said, ‘Well, ask them what they understand that happened with Jonah and the whale that’s so silly.’

“They’ll argue, ‘Well, we all know that nobody could live in a whale for three days,’ and you simply respond, ‘Well, would you please tell me who said he lived in it for three days?’

“You see, in Matthew 12:40, it says Jesus died and went to the heart of the earth and we know Jonah died and went to the heart of the earth too. Didn’t you ever read Jonah 2 when he says he was down in hell and in the bars of the mountains and all that stuff holding him?

“Jonah died, folks, because if Jonah’s gonna be a type of the resurrection of Christ, what would he have to do? He’d need to die so he could be what? Resurrected. You don’t get resurrected unless you die. And that big old fish swallowed him down and he died.

“You remember when you were a kid (in the ’50s) watching a cartoon on TV about this big fish swallowing this guy on a raft? He goes down on his belly and he’s on the raft, and he’s holding onto the raft and he gets up and takes out his little hammers and begins to play a tune on the tonsils and the ribs of the fish. And finally he starts a fire and the fish burps him out.

“That isn’t what happened to Jonah, but that’s where people get their doctrine about Jonah! No wonder they think it’s nuts! Jonah died and after three days and three nights, the fish got sick, upchucked him on the bank and God resurrected him.

“You don’t have to worry about someone living in a whale’s belly for three days and three nights and you don’t have to worry about it not being a whale because it was.

“People say, ‘Well, the Greek word . . .’ Yeah, I know what the Greek word is and I know what it means and there’s a reason in Genesis 1 that it said God created whales. See, people got rid of that because they didn’t like the three days and three nights. They think, ‘Just get rid of the whole thing and don’t make any of it literal and real.’ ”