When I was a child our family attended St Peter's Lutheran Church in NYC. At the time it was a gothic-type church, sort of a smaller version of St. Patrick's. It was later torn down to make way for Citicorp, a huge office building with a smaller, more modern St Peter's at the base. My father thought Citicorp looked like a man in his underwear and that it was an apt representation of our time - this huge edifice to Mammon with the small church cowering beneath it.
Children are born into a world that they are ignorant of and for the most part assume that "Grownups know everything!" and "Grownups know the truth!" As a little girl attending Sunday school we'd later go to the main area where our parents were listening to the sermon. On the walls, as I recall, were murals of Jesus on a cloud surrounded by angels. The pastor would say "Let us pray," and everyone around me would bow their heads and pray. I'd sit there thinking there must be something wrong with me as I simply could not believe but I didn't dare say anything as I feared god would strike me dead (so I'm inconsistent, hey I was a kid). It wasn't until I was 10 that I dared say anything out loud and, as I was in distress about my mother, I may have been attempting suicide-by-deity (a variation of suicide-by-cop) as he (if he truly existed) would declare, "What she doesn't believe in me? I'll strike her dead." Obviously nothing happened and decades later I'm still alive and still not believing in the biblical god.
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