I also never took the idea of a real interventionist god seriously, and while I’ve only lived one childhood and so can’t compare the effect of this influence to its absence, it might have had to do with the fact that I learned about dead religions at a very early age. By the time my fundamentalist grandmother started proselytizing to me at the age of three, I already had significant exposure to Greek mythology, and I mentally filed “Grandma’s beliefs about God” into the same class as “Ancient Greeks’ beliefs about gods.” It didn’t even occur to me until I was about eleven that these were beliefs I was expected to take seriously and have an emotional investment in.
I did experiment with the idea of a non denominational god as a kid, but I never felt the need to make excuses for the hypotheses if they turned up null results. I concluded that if there was a god, it wasn’t giving me any reason to worship or believe in it, so I might as well assume it didn’t exist.
I also never took the idea of a real interventionist god seriously, and while I’ve only lived one childhood and so can’t compare the effect of this influence to its absence, it might have had to do with the fact that I learned about dead religions at a very early age. By the time my fundamentalist grandmother started proselytizing to me at the age of three, I already had significant exposure to Greek mythology, and I mentally filed “Grandma’s beliefs about God” into the same class as “Ancient Greeks’ beliefs about gods.” It didn’t even occur to me until I was about eleven that these were beliefs I was expected to take seriously and have an emotional investment in.
I did experiment with the idea of a non denominational god as a kid, but I never felt the need to make excuses for the hypotheses if they turned up null results. I concluded that if there was a god, it wasn’t giving me any reason to worship or believe in it, so I might as well assume it didn’t exist.