Things you said as a child that horrified your religious parents.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was brought up as a young-earth creationist, ultra-fundamentalist Pentecostal and attended religious schools so I was fully surrounded by religious zealots. One day when I was about 8 I said to my mom “Aren’t humans just really smart animals?” She very emphatically “corrected” me and said something like “NOOOO! Humans were made by god in his image and were given dominion over the animals!”.

It’s interesting to me that, having never even heard of evolution or that there could even be another option other than creation, I knew intuitively that what I was being taught didn’t make sense.

2

As a pre-teen, there was a story in the newspaper (Dad read at the table) about a couple who were killed when they tried to pass (double yellow line) in a tunnel. This being Sunday morning, I asked out loud if that was fair of God to punish them with death for a simple traffic offense. Wide-eyed, wild-eyed looks from all. I probably have the Mark of the Beast on me somewhere.

3

Junior high school age, mid 1960’s. We were studying Acts (I think) where it says that the early Christians sold their possessions, gave the money to the church, and received back what they needed. I said, “They were communists.” Not an appropriate comment in a Baptist church in the South at the height of the Cold War.

4

I’m not sure that I horrified my parents.

Still, I did have the priest rolling with laughter during my first confession.
(…was that wrong…?)

5

I was a conformist child and don’t think I ever said anything to “horrify” my parents. But when in second grade Sunday School I asked the teacher about the Exodus. I asked "if you went to the bottom of the Red Sea would you still find Pharoah’s soldiers and chariots’

I was kind of doubting the story maybe. Anyway, my teacher was frank and treated the question as an honest one. He said no, one wouldn’t find all that. He said that when you die you body will “go away” and that after so long under water metal would rust and wood dissolve. I’d been looking for “proof” I think, but I did appreciate an honest answer, even if wasn’t what I was looking for.

6

We were talking about hail. You know the white balls that fall from the sky?

Well, I guess I mispronounced it, as they said it sounded like “hell”. Which was a bad word to say in the family. The soap bars came out and into my mouth.

7

2nd grade (I think) Reform Jewish sunday school. We were learning about monotheism, and how we Jews were the first to believe in only one God. I asked the teacher, “What if we’re wrong? What if, some day, we discover that there are more Gods, or none at all?” The teacher simply repeated, “Well, WE believe in only one God.”

She then told my mother, who told my father, who was not at all pleased. He hit me and said I’d grow up to be a goddamn atheist. Actually that took just a few more years.

8

Given a Bible at age 7 by my grandmother, I, a little bookworm, immediately began to read it from page 1. I was doing pretty well with my dictionary’s help until the Book of Samuel where David was challenged with bringing back 100 Philistine foreskins.

Baffled I asked my Sunday school teacher what a foreskin was. She asked me why I wanted to know so I told her. After class she called my mom in for a “talk.”

In a horrified low voice she asked my mom, “Do you know she is reading the Bible?” lol

Hey, I still maintain those are some great stories, especially Judges, Samuel and Kings. If you never gave it a try, start with Judges. Ignore the names of the cities, and enjoy some amazing stories.

9

If God knows everything, and God creates everyone, and some people go to Hell when they die, then God must have created those people knowing they would end up in Hell. Why would God do that?

10

Please allow me to start from the finale.

One day when I was seventeen, I was leaving the house to go to Confirmation Catechesis and found a very confused gentleman trying to find something in the mess that was our ground-floor bells. You see, the geniuses who installed the ringers weren’t systematic about setting them in order: they just wired up the whole panel and then tested which button was for which flat. Our flat (9B) was somewhere near the bottom, surrounded by 0A, 1C, 3C and 3A. I pointed to 9B and said “if you’re looking for [our lastname] it’s that button, Jaime isn’t home but Maite is”. “How do you know?” “A priest dressed as a priest*, not Opus Dei** and not from the parish? You’re coming to see my parents.”

Fifteen minutes later I’m back home. My mother’s reaction “what? How are you back already? See! See this daughter! She’s going to take me to my grave, I can’t believe it, God knows what has she done now…” The priest interrupted the jeremiad pointing out that maybe they should find out how come I was already back home, before calling for Cerberus and Michael?

I explained that the pastor hadn’t prepared anything and had told us to “just ask any questions”. One of us had asked what about miracles, do you have to believe them all? Some don’t so much require a leap of faith as a leaping run. The pastor had given an answer out of a “Christ was an alien spy” set of novels, we’d responded that

  1. JJ Benítez does not represent the official opinion of the RCC
  2. when we ask for the opinion of the RCC, we would like something out of the Catechism, Encyclicas and suchlike
  3. to let us know when he’d gone over his old classnotes, and hey, since he didn’t seem to have anything to tell us we were taking off

Mom was furious but the priest cut her short. She turned on him, yelling that “this daughter, she is horrible, why, when she was five she stopped talking to God, she’s so evil, she’s such a liar***, you cannot believe a word she says, she…” Again he interrupted. “Wait, you’re still furious over something she did when she was five years old?” “But it was horrible!” “… Do you even know what she’s talking about?”
“Well, yeah, but I sure didn’t know she was still angry about it. I’d been told ask and ye shall receive, I’d heard the reason I didn’t get more than one doll and sometimes none was that I was an only child, I’d been asking for a little sib for over a year, which I knew to be time more than enough for one to arrive, and eventually I told God ‘ok, since you evidently don’t feel like paying attention to what I say, I’m not talking to you any more’”.
“See? This daughter, she will be my death! She”
“She had better theology at five than my seminar students at twentyfive! Jesus Christ, woman, how can you still be angry at her over something which happened when she was five and by the way she was right!”
Dude was one of the writers of the current Catechism, he’s a pretty big name in theological circles.

  • black trousers and shirt, clerical collar
    ** he didn’t look like he was in the wrong century
    *** her standard response any time I said anything she disagreed with, including “the new teacher just tried to grab my ass” or “my foot hurts”
11

“Off at a bit of a tangent”: in a Scripture lesson at school in the early 1960s, when I was about eleven, this NT passage came up. Our headmaster (devout Christian, religiously and mostly-politically conservative) who was taking the lesson, commented to the effect of: “that’s real communism; as opposed to the nasty stuff which the present-day Russians and Chinese are engaging in”.

12

Wasn’t a parent (my parents weren’t very religious) but an aunt. One of my aunts had one of those really graphic crucifixes in her bedroom, the tortured bloody guy nailed to a cross variety. I was probably about 4, and as I noted, came from a non-religious very secular household. For some reason I went into my aunt’s bedroom and came face to face with what looked like a bleeding person nailed to the wall.

I screamed.

My aunt was horrified - how could I react so negatively to such a symbol of beautiful things? Well, for starters, I thought I had walked into a murder scene (not that I thought in those exact terms, I was four after all). I didn’t have all her positive associations with a method of death by torture, so I was terrified and horrified and really didn’t understand.

That side of the family is probably still convinced I’m possessed or a spawn of satan or something.

My relationship with my aunt did improve once I was an adult, but honestly, I think some people forget just how horrific an actual crucifixion would be and that those outside their tradition don’t get warm and fuzzy feeling from crucifixes, with or without bloody corpses attached.

13

I said something similar in a religion class in Catholic school sometime around 1990. I was “commie” from some for the rest of high school.

14

A friend horrified her grandmother by asking who the guy on the anchor was.

15

Not my own parents, the (devoutly religious) parents of my best friend when I was about seven or eight.

The friend and I were talking about The Flintstones, which were wildly popular at that time. I said something to the effect that people and dinosaurs couldn’t have existed at the same time, because dinosaurs were extinct for millions of years by the time people started to evolve. Her mother got a horrified look on her face and hustled me briskly out of their house, and it was only years later that I figured out why this pissed her off.

16

Nm… read op wrong

17

Sometime between the ages of six and eleven I came to the following realization: The ancient Greeks and the Vikings worshiped their gods, and they were sure they were right; so just being sure doesn’t prove anything. Unfortunately I happened to mention this revelation to my mom during the middle of church. She was not amused.

18

Nothing profound. Basically that church was boring and I hated it and didn’t want to go.

19

Not my parents. But my 2nd grade school teacher and classmates…
Easter break was coming up and I asked “So what’s this whole Easter thing about??” I had know Idea. Christmas was Santa.

20

I went to church with my mother until I was about eight years old. For some reason she quit going and we never had any truck with a church the rest of my growing up years, never said any prayers in the house and never discussed church or religion. When I was in high school, I voiced my doubt about god for the first time. Horrified, she said: “Well, you do believe in god, don’t you?!” I mumbled something about not being sure and escaped quickly. Looking back, I should have countered with “What have you done to foster that belief?”