My mom was an asst. professor at the University of Hawaii when I was growing up, and the whole environment I lived in was welcoming to science and rationality, even though I went to a Catholic high school for two years where the teachers were Marianist Brothers. They never tried to mix religion and science back in those days.

So it was a shock back in the early 2000s when I realized how many of the conservative readers of my site were real live creationists. Like, most of them.