Why I don't believe in god.

[trof]

"I was the first child in a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too Reform Jewish family who also did Christmas and Easter. Being born into that situation set me up to be told the following:

◾Once a year, an obese middle-aged man breaks into our house in the least efficient way possible, leaves a bunch of wrapped gifts for me, and then instead of just walking out the door, decides to work his way back up the chimney, where he’s then carried off by a group of large, wingless, flying mammals to do the same thing over a billion other times in a span of a few hours.

◾On Passover, an invisible man breaks into the house silently while we’re all eating because he wants to drink a small glass of wine.

◾That same week, a 10-foot-tall sentient rabbit breaks into the house, possibly by morphing through the wall, and puts a bunch of chocolate eggs that he laid all over the place for no apparent reason.

◾When one of my teeth falls out, if I put it under my pillow, a flying woman will break into my bedroom while I’m sleeping and buy the tooth from me for an amount of her choosing.

◾Let’s add in that no one ever explained that fiction exists, so I assumed that all Sesame Street creatures were actual biological things that existed in the wild.

So flying people breaking into my room to molest me while I slept because I washed my face? Fuckin sure, why not. It was a totally ordinary thing to happen—this exact kind of shit happened constantly in my world.

All this information came as part of the same orientation that taught me English, told me what shapes and colors were and how to poop, and explained that it’s bad to stare at really short adults.

It was a lot of information, but I was handling it well, when suddenly I was hit with a disturbing twist. I began to be told, about certain parts of my reality, “Oh yeah no that’s totally false.” Wait. What? I’m a complete amateur at this, and busting my ass trying to gain knowledge and skills, and they’ve been fucking with me? Not only that, I learn that all the fun things are fake and all the mundane things are real."
http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/how-religion-got-in-the-way.html

[SusanCalvin]

1. I never believed any of those, to my recollection.

I think it had a lot to do with learning to read *very* early, and learning the difference between fact and fiction also very early.

When I was introduced to Bible stories, I took them, correctly I believe, as fiction. Having been introduced to Greek mythology first didn't hurt... ;->

[Freelancer]

2. All of those are mythical -- except for Santa and Krampus, of course. Duh.

You're lucky older kids didn't tell you about Krampus when you were little. I spent a couple of sleepless Christmas Eves worried about being stuffed into a sack and dragged to Santa's workshop to work as a slave -- making toys for good children to play with.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Should your parents tell you ...

[PassingFair]

4. My father had me convinced that the tooth fairy was a young man with wings...

in a turtle neck.

Not. Kidding.