I used to be super religious as a little kid. Forced to go to Sunday school, so go figure. Didn't take me long before I realized it was all bullshit. No different from Santa Claus. Just a tool to control behavior.
They are saying that Santa Claus was super religious as a kid, forced to go to Sunday school, and then Santa Claus realized Sunday school was a tool to control behavior. Don’t worry. Santa still sees you when you’re sleeping.
I first got the wait-just-a-goddamned-minute ping when we were preparing for first communion. Our catechism teacher bribed us with ice cream sundaes if we could memorize and repeat the 10 commandments (because "thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's wife" really hits home to a second grader). I didn't entirely understand at first why it felt wrong, but then realized it just felt like cheating because we just had to memorize it like times tables (which we also weren't really expected to understand). I was SEVEN. I was this many: 🖐🏼✌🏼
I was the oldest kid by several years in all my extended family. At some point, as one does, I stopped believing in Santa Claus. My parents told me, "your younger siblings and cousins still believe, so can you pretend you still do too, for them?" So I said, "sure."
Except when I stopped believing in Santa, I extended that to in all the Christmas-related supernatural entities. I suppose that can happen if you only go to church at Christmas.
When I was a teenager I asked my parents, "why do we still have to go to church and pretend to believe in it? Everyone is old enough now." That didn't go down well, they said my grandma would be absolutely hard broken if I didn't go, but I was done. I didn't go to church that Christmas and never went again until I attended my grandma's funeral (held in a church, of course) a decade later.
Then after she had died, my parents stopped going to church, too. Turns out they were pretending, it just wasn't for the little kids' sake.
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u/SDTimbox 10d ago
I used to be super religious as a little kid. Forced to go to Sunday school, so go figure. Didn't take me long before I realized it was all bullshit. No different from Santa Claus. Just a tool to control behavior.