I told my little girl about angels yesterday...

[mordant]

Your parents sound fantastic.

I agree with you 100%, Shadow. I wish my parents had never lied to me about stuff like that and yes it did cause me anxiety and has impacted my life greatly.

They are.

I think it's one of those things that harms people to varying degrees; some just lose some trust in their parents or learn a little slower from being lied to, some people's minds get wrecked. My mom was raised hard core catholic, and she tells me that one of the biggest problems was that she couldn't form a cohesive view of the world because once she realized religion was a lie, she assumed that everything she studied alongside her religion classes must be BS as well. The institution of her school lost its credibility. The same thing goes for parents: if you know your parents lied to you, they are no longer a credible source of wisdom.

My parents were taken in by the fundamentalist Christian delusions in the early 1960s which means I was very nearly suckled on Christian fundamentalism from the cradle. Yet, while recognizing that was a Bad Move on their part, and also recognizing that my mother in particular was highly avoidant of unwelcome / unpleasant / unwanted information about reality, thus setting me up for various epic failures later in life, I would also characterize my parents as "fantastic". They had good boundaries, minded their own business and kept whatever concerns they had to themselves once I was an adult. They never, ever judged me and I knew 100% that their love for me was unconditional. They also taught me what kindness is. Those things are so huge in and of themselves that I can forgive a multitude of failings, particularly for a couple who both quit school after 6th grade. My father gave me raw intelligence (despite his lack of education he went on to be a master aircraft mechanic and held a pilots license with instrument rating) as well as empathy, and my mother gave me steady unflinching love. That transcends religion.

Sometimes I think people conflate bad parenting that happened to be encouraged by religion, with a purely religiously mediated lack, like somehow their parents would have been excellent but for religion alone. Often, bad parents are attracted to Christianity and its ultimate dysfunctional father-figure, because that's the people they are to begin with.