What is the oddest thing you believed as a child?

That if I wore a red cape with my blue pajamas, I could fly.

@Espiritus_Corvus I hope you didn’t act on that.
My dad had told me I was the last little girl that God made with blonde hair and brown eyes. I believed that for a long time.

If I put milk in my bath, my bones would grow and I would get taller. Since I was both the youngest and shortest kid in the class, you can imagine how many times I got in trouble for wasting milk.

My father told me that my eyes turn brown when I have to pee. Every time I had to pee I looked in the bathroom mirror .

Mount Rushmore is a natural formation, much like New Hampshire’s rather impressive, but now gone, Old Man of the Mountain.

Bugs Bunny once threw a piece of black cloth on the ground. It was round. Then he jumped into it because it had turned into a hole. I asked my Mom to make me one. She did. I spent 15 trying to get up the nerve to jump. I was really quite scared! But I finally did it. I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. I think I was 4.

I thought that Labour day was only for pregnant women.

I thought the dentist, the doctor, the shoe store clerk and the barber were equivalent trades. To me they were all people who provide hands-on service

That beer and root beer must have been derived from that same plant. I never really believed anything real odd. I never really believed most of the stuff most other kids believe. Seems like I’ve been a skeptic from birth.

I believed that people who do the “pull my finger” gag were capable of farting on command.

…I believed this until I was 25.

My parents were Catholics. To understand what that means, when my mother died, the priest came in to give her a final blessing. I was the only one in the room and he asked me if I was a Catholic. I told him I had been baptized, but I don’t go to church and I’m an atheist. His response? “So you’re a Catholic.”

So my religious indoctrination was rather… haphazard. Even among devout Catholics, the church discourages reading of the Bible; the priests will tell you what you need to know. As a result, I had some strange religious understandings.

Whenever I lied, my parents would fix me with a steely gaze and say, “Are you lying? Because when you lie, you burn Jesus as if by fire.”

I didn’t know who this Jesus guy was, but given how much I lied I knew the guy must be absolutely furious with me. I was terrified that Jesus was going to hunt me down. “WHERE IS THAT FUCKER WHO KEEPS BURNING ME?!”

I also somehow got the idea that the soul was a white cookie-like disc. My parents told me that when you sin, you get a black spot on your soul, and that if your soul ever turns completely black, you go to Hell and burn forever. When I asked my parents where the soul was, they pointed to their hearts – or rather, where they thought their hearts were, at the top of the clavicle. I understood them to be saying that my soul resided in the back of my throat. Every time I sinned, I would try to look down my throat in the mirror to see if I could check on my blackness level and make sure the ground wasn’t about to open up and drag me down to the lake of eternal fire.

My mother had her own weird beliefs. For instance, I remember as a child being told that no one could be exactly six feet tall. Her reasoning went like this: Six feet is the perfect height for a man. The only perfect man was Jesus, so he was precisely six feet tall. Since no one else is perfect, no one else can be six feet tall, QED. Everyone is either very slightly more or very slightly less than six feet tall. When I asked her how someone gets to be more than six feet without at some point being six feet exactly, she’d just get angry and refuse to talk any more.

That there was a “God.”

@SmashTheState Wow! Your Catholic teachings were even stranger than mine, in some ways. My mother attended an all-girl Catholic school taught by sisters of the Sacred Heart, a bit of a cult I’ve learned.
Of course, a lie is a bad sin because it violates one of the Ten Commandments. I suppose one lie is the same as another, like, “The sky is green” will send you to hell as sure as “He did it, let him die.”
Minor sins were dealt with by a trip to Purgatory where sins were cleansed of the soul by fire, like “Original Sin.”
I think everybody has their own version of what Hell is and the many ways to get there. Like believers: ask 1000 of them what they think and get 1000 different answers.
Eh!

I believed in the tooth fairy.

That man came from apes subhumans, I cannot remember when I stopped believing that folly of nonsense but it was close to my teens.

The belief that people couldn’t understand that we came from apes. That was strange to me. It’s not like we’re supposed to come from spiders.~

I once believed we came from two white people in a garden.

I thought grown ups had, and had to have, all the answers. In my little mind, I thought the world was much more complicated than it actually was, and I thought grown ups were much more infallible and smarter than they actually are. It took me a really long time to loose my naivety and gain the confidence to realise I might be kind of smart. Maybe that is why I feel so frustrated and angry when I see that in other people, now that I’m an old lady. Life is a never ending process of learning, for those open to it. Other people seem to still look for those easy tin canned answers and stagnate and it does frustrate me.

For a short time, I thought that people on the TV lived in the TV. But only the up close ones like news readers.

I thought the world was black & white in the old days, everyone living actually only ever saw the world in those drab, grey colours.
Also, when it rained I believed it rained all over the world at the same time, after all, we’re all under the same big arsed sky right?

Until I was embarrassingly old, I believed Earth was separated from space by a shell of fire. This is what I thought “the atmosphere” was. Because I only ever heard that term used in the context of people talking about meteors, astroids, and other space debris “burning up in the atmosphere.” It wasn’t until middle school Earth science class that I learned the truth. Thank goodness I learned that via lecture and not via me raising my hand and saying something ridiculous and getting publicly corrected.

I don’t understand how this happened, lol. I came from a very science-minded household and my dad was a huge astronomy enthusiast and he shared that with his kids a lot.

@Mariah Oh, I did a thing in my psychology class by raising my hand. I was 16 and we were discussing dreams. I raised my hand and asked, ‘Does anyone else dream they are the opposite sex? That’s normal, right?’ Clue one.

I thought that everything was alive. I distinctly remember feeling bad for a french fry I had dropped at a restaurant. I thought it must be feeling lonely, so I dropped a couple more.

^ That’s adorable.

@longgone My husband was similar. He felt almost everything had feelings. That he should take care of his toy cars so they were ok. It’s very sweet. He still cares for “things” in a way that is a remnant of that.

^ Thanks, you two.

I thought that the Flintstones were real. Other comics/cartoons I understood as comics/cartoons. Not the Flintstones. I saw their cartoons as something like the travelogues we were always going to.

I wasn’t afraid of general “monsters” under my bed, but Satan. Catholicism and the young imagination, folks.

We didn’t come from apes. We have a common ancestor. Just making some clarifications there.

@Dutchess_III

Yup, and that point of divergence was around 7,000,000 years ago. Unless I’m quite mistaken none of the currently existing primate species existed then.

It’s sorta like, to use a simplified analogy, you and your 5th cousin. You are, undeniably related, but neither come from the other – you share a common ancestor. Neither of you were living when this common ancestor was around, and this common ancestor was no longer living by the time you and your cousin were born.

Right.

I believed my brother was in Heaven and I wished I had a phone to talk to him on.

I believed the easter bunny was about 6 feet tall and pink. I found that terrifying, a giant rabbit hopping around leaving eggs for children.
I believed that just sleeping next to another person would make you pregnant. haha
The worst, I truly believed that “God” could hear your every thought and see everything you did.

Talk about fucking with childrens minds, what a horror story that was. I remember sitting on the toilet around age 6 or so and being so uncomfortable thinking “God” was watching me go to the bathroom. lol

@Coloma Horror of horrors!

My sisters and i thought my mom had her boobs tied, not her tubes tied. My little sister announced it at show n tell. My mom got a call from the teacher, lol.

@Coloma You saw the film Harvey with Jimmy Stewart when you were a kid, didn’t you?

@janbb I didn’t know you lost your brother so early. I watched my two youngest sibs go through that. It got me when I read what you wrote.

@Espiritus_Corvus haha, I almost mentioned that, yes, clearly it made an impression.

There were many things. The best one is that I thought that inside of our bodies was pound cake. I seriously thought that if you cut your arm off, there would be pound cake on the inside.

I know. I don’t know. Beats me.

Had her boobs tied!! Hilarious!

I remembered another that had my mam in stitches at the time.
Me & her were returning from a brief shopping trip & as we walked I noticed a sign painted in white on the pavement. I read it & said, in some state of shock, “Mam, why does it say No Giggling?”
The actual words said, No Cycling :D

I thought bumblebees and honeybees were the males and females respectively of one species.

After sex ed class,I thought the man’s testicles detached from his body and went into the female. I was terrified. What if she ran off with them? Would it hurt when they detatched? My classmates and I were SO confused.

Yes. I had a terrible sex ed teacher….

^^^^ You poor thing!!

I told my daughter who is almost 29 now that there were little monkeys inside the traffic lights that pushed buttons to change the colors. She told me around age 20 that she totally believed that for years and years. 1001 ways to mess with your children. lol

I belived that in trig that their was an opposite adjacent side. Not opposite and adjacent sides. Messed me up good. Also in accounting I confused credits for debits. Which is why I’m not an rich accountant now.

Detachable testicles. Someone really didn’t do a good job explaining sex.

Now I’ve got a visual of testicles that are like those two piece key-chains

@BellaB & @MrGrimm888 Detatchable Penis

That death hung around our hallway at night looking to chop off our heads. But if I ran really quick to my brothers room I could avoid being beheaded. For some reason I didn’t think he could enter our rooms. LOL
(We use to play a kind of revolving door game with my brothers where they would extend their arms and turn about quickly pretending to chop of our heads. This lead to nightmares about Death in a dark cloak carrying his scythe ready to kill me.) By day I thought it was nonsense. But in darkness. Anything was possible and most likely true. So if I couldn’t sleep and I wanted company, I would quickly dash down the hall and duck and roll to be too slippery for Death to get me.) I was good. I’m still here. LOL

We had a basement in our house in West Seattle. Coming up the basement steps gave me the creeps. It felt like someone was behind me, watching me. Mom told me it was Jesus, so don’t worry.
I thought, “That isn’t a very nice thing for Jesus to do to a little kid!”

@Dutchess_III Man, another great example of terrorizing kids with “Jesus.” Not only does he know everything you think, say and do, but he also stalks you up the basement stairs. haha “Lord” talk about using Jesus as a weapon. lol

At least Santa Claus brings presents while knowing whether you’re awake or asleep or whether you have been bad or good. There is some reward to that tall tale anyway.

She meant well.

Either way. Most of us were told someone was watching our every move. Not fun. Hard to do just about anything without considering the consequences of the judgement of the omnipresent being who watches you.

Ironically, there will be an omnipresent ‘god’one day. One who can tell where we are with facial recognition, and probably record our every activity.

@Coloma When I was a little kid, I found that whole ubiquitous-Santa thing to be creepy. But, then, I also thought Santa was scary and would recoil in fear.

Despite my skepticism I still wanted to believe in Santa (even though I’d sometimes glimpse wrapped presents sitting in my parents’ closet days or weeks before Christmas). Every year a few days before Christmas the local bank would host Santa in their lobby. Like most kids I was always excited to go. Then one year, in the bank lobby, telling Santa what I wanted for Christmas that’s when it struck me – I realized that “Santa” was my uncle Jack. That’s when I concluded, once and for all, that Santa Claus was, as my own nephew would so eloquently sum up many years later, “nothing but a fake fat fuck”.

My mom was raised Catholic. Then, 10 years after she married my dad and had us 3 girls, got a letter from the church excommunicating her because my dad had been married briefly once before. She walked away from Catholicism, and didn’ t go back until after the Alzheimer’s set in. But I remember that incident clearly, and thought, as she did, that it was really stupid.
Growing up it was just assumed that God was real, so I was raised as a Christian. I don’t remember much church and they never used God’s wrath as a weapon. They did good, considering.

My mom and dad were raised Catholic. She walked away and I am her only child of the 9 that was not baptised and had communion and confirmed in the church. Obviously, the devil got to me.

^^^THAT explains it! :D

In second or third grade I had an EEG. I was uncomfortable with all those wires in my hair, and terribly frightened because I thought they were going to be able to read my thoughts. And as soon as I thought that I started thinking of all of the worst sort of things that would get me in all kinds of trouble if somebody knew I was thinking such things. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

My son had one as part of his diagnosis. The school thought there may be some epilepsy so he had to take an EEG. They did the test and he was awesome and so brave. Then, he asked if he could try to move the lines using his mind and the technician, so much credit to her, agreed and gave him an extra 5 minutes to see what he could do by concentrating. No result. Oh well. At least he did the experiment.

@cazzie I love that story

That my sisters birth control was candy. I ate a whole weeks worth. No side effects.

http://www.fluther.com/196106/what-would-happen-to-a-6-year-old-male-if-he/