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What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

gncxx said:
"I believed that all the events in the Bible happened in Britain."

Pardon me, but wasn't there a crank British author who proposed, and attempted to prove, exactly this?

Hey, maybe Moses DID come from Middlebury.
 
gerardwilkie said:
OldTimeRadio said:
gncxx said:
"I believed that all the events in the Bible happened in Britain."

Pardon me, but wasn't there a crank British author who proposed, and attempted to prove, exactly this?

Hey, maybe Moses DID come from Middlebury.

Check this link for theories :

http://www.revneal.org/Writings/british.htm#INTRODUCTION

and I think the author you are on about is William Comyns Beaumont :

http://www.pibburns.com/smmia5.htm
 
mate of mine was telling me that he thought the story of jesus was the same as santa claus, in that one day someone would tell him it was lies, he's still waiting....

i just had a vision of hundreds of priests and the whole chapel lauging away when it was revealed as a lie one sunday....


on the other hand my ma convinced me for many years i couldn't watch telly in the morning cos the man wasn't up yet. lazy bastard.
 
I remember arguing with my Cathloic Grandmother when I was about 5 years old because I believed that we had evolved from monkeys and were in fact animals. She told me we wernt.......

I also remember arguing with my cousian at about the same age because he thought that men and women had a different number of ribs as God had taken one of mans to create Eve. He had been "taught" this at Sundnay school.

But my favourite one was I used to believe that tulips were similar to venus fly traps and if you got to close they would bite you. This let to me chopping the head off every single tulip in the garden with a wooden sword.
 
I used to think that if I blew hard enough I could blow out the red traffic light and make it green.

I also convinced my brother that all coins were worth the same so if he gave me his one shiney 50p I would give him two nice pennies. Two is bigger than one, see... :)
 
chockfullahate said:
"mate of mine was telling me that he thought the story of jesus was the same as santa claus, in that one day someone would tell him it was lies, he's still waiting...."

There's a story I heard between 35 and 40 years ago related to this. I assumed for all that time that it was just an UL or even merely a joke, but tonight I'm by no longer so certain.

Mother's just finished telling her eight-year-old son [the version I heard was sex-specific] that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are all fantasies.

The little boy wanders away to consider this particular rite of passage into adulthood, but returns 10 minutes later.

"Mommy," the kid asks anxiously, "am I still allowed to believe in Jesus?"
 
OldTimeRadio said:
chockfullahate said:
"mate of mine was telling me that he thought the story of jesus was the same as santa claus, in that one day someone would tell him it was lies, he's still waiting...."

There's a story I heard between 35 and 40 years ago related to this. I assumed for all that time that it was just an UL or even merely a joke, but tonight I'm by no longer so certain.

Mother's just finished telling her eight-year-old son [the version I heard was sex-specific] that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are all fantasies.

The little boy wanders away to consider this particular rite of passage into adulthood, but returns 10 minutes later.

"Mommy," the kid asks anxiously, "am I still allowed to believe in Jesus?"

if you are a kid, trying to make sense of the world, and your parents tell you all the fantastic stories like a fat guy who drops down the chimney once a year to leave presents, then other stories like about some guy who brings people back from the dead, and turns water into wine, well all those stories seem as fantastic as the other, and i am sure a lot of kids would think this way.
 
BELOW Zero

One winter day when I was around seven I told my Mother than I was going outside to play.

"Are you dressed warmly enough?" Mother cautioned. "It's below zero out."

"BELOW zero!" I shouted. "Is the world coming to an end?" [I asked that question in unmost seriousness.]

"Don't be silly," Mom replied. "The temperature goes below zero almost every year. It was below zero last winter when we drove up to Aunt Marge's farm."

I wasn't completely convinced. BELOW Zero! Isn't that somewhere in the realm of constructing square triangles or of suddenly turning....inside out?

I went out to play but I kept looking over my shoulder to see if the scenes were being changed.....or just plain being taken away, as in Lord Dunsany's wonderful short-short-short-short story "The Taking Up of Piccadilly."

And I wasn't entire relieved until the temperature rose again.

P. S. Reminds me of a little lame hot-weather joke that used to be a regular exchange between me and a former girlfriend:

She: "The temperature finally broke today."

Me: "Oh, no! Do they think they'll be able to FIX it?"

She: "I certainly hope not."
 
You know those police dog displays that you sometimes see at fetes and tattoos? Well, I used to think that when the alsatian was chasing a human target, it was actually chasing a real criminal who'd been deliberately set free just so that the dog could bring him down. Kind of like a low-rent version of the The Running Man, or something.

I also used to think that people (myself included) didn't have any internal organs whatsoever, and were composed entirely of some kind of sausagemeat-like stuff.

It's vague, but I'm sure I can remember once believing that I could build a robot out of a piece of chalk.
 
Oh - some others have just sprung to mind...

I used to believe that when fireworks went off, they dropped little presents. I can distinctly remember being very upset at having to leave a firework display, because mum wasn't giving me a chance to go looking for my fair share of gifts...

I also used to think that policemen and soldiers were the deadliest of enemies, and existed solely to fight one another.
 
barfing_pumpkin said:
"I also used to think that people (myself included) didn't have any internal organs whatsoever, and were composed entirely of some kind of sausagemeat-like stuff."

In the wonderful old Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner) science-fantasy tale "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" one of the characters remarks that younger "children see themselves as solid inside, like a potato."

But at that age I visualized myself as mostly HOLLOW inside, like the expanded bellows of an accordion. ("Ah, Wagner, NOW we know why you're so full of hot air.")

Wheeze.
 
Thinking that old people saw in black and white and that colour vision was relatively new :) Ah well.
 
I used to believe that there were little men with candles who lived under the road. Every car had it's own man and when you went out at night he would run in front of the car so that his candle light could be seen through the 'cat eyes'.

I also used to believe that adults knew everything. I didn't realise that being a grown up was al ad-libbed.
 
Re: Second World War lasted Longer than You Thought

OldTimeRadio said:
Around 1960 my very young first cousin believed that World War Two was still in progress, but that only Bellevue, Kentucky and neighboring Dayton, Kentucky were still fighting it.

I too had some confusion about when and where World War 2 had taken place. In our local town hall (in suburban Toronto) there was a circular area on the ceiling where the plaster had been repaired at some time. Other kids told me - and I believed - that the damage had been caused by a German bomb.

My best friend and I once saw a hobo asleep by the railway tracks and fled in terror, somehow convinced that he was Frankenstein's monster.
 
lupinwick said:
"Thinking that old people saw in black and white and that colour vision was relatively new :)"

There is a current of belief (with which I personally disagree) that color vision is HISTORICALLY recent; that is, the most ancient Hellenic Greeks didn't yet have it.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
There is a current of belief (with which I personally disagree) that color vision is HISTORICALLY recent; that is, the most ancient Hellenic Greeks didn't yet have it.
Oh good, we're back to Homer and wine-dark sea! :D
 
When I was a kid I believed that some very old people contracted a terrible oral disease which caused their gums to turn ebony-black. This was augmented by the fact that none of the old people in my family had black gums.

It wasn't until much later (don't ask) that I finally realized that older false teeth dental plates were made from india rubber instead of modern flesh-colored plastics.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
There is a current of belief (with which I personally disagree) that color vision is HISTORICALLY recent; that is, the most ancient Hellenic Greeks didn't yet have it.

I ran into this one in the first year of university. The professor didn't want to admit to herself that the ancient Greeks she admired so much polychromed their statues (and nearly everything else). The paint has washed away since.
 
I must have been suffering from a feverish cold when I came to the strange conclusion that daylight came in throbbing pulses, each incrementally lighter or darker, before or after noon.

Trying to explain this theory to my mother, I could only say that "It gets light then it gets dark again."

She confirmed that this was indeed correct, but I don't think she had fully grasped my revolutionary thinking on the subject.

I can also remember asking her a very Fortean question at the age of around six, "What is it called when we wake up in another place?"

She could only suggest that I meant a dream or a nightmare. Yet I had a firm belief that we could be physically transported during sleep and that this was a common human experience for which there ought to be a word.

Children are, I suppose, quite portable when asleep so the origin of this personal occult belief may not be too far from the light of common day. :)
 
OldTimeRadio said:
When I was a kid I believed that some very old people contracted a terrible oral disease which caused their gums to turn ebony-black. This was augmented by the fact that none of the old people in my family had black gums.

It wasn't until much later (don't ask) that I finally realized that older false teeth dental plates were made from india rubber instead of modern flesh-colored plastics.

strangely enough, when I was younger (and I'm very sure I've mentioned this on here before) but

our neighbour who was good friends with the family told my mother and anyone in the subsequent vicinity (i.e. the whole street) that she had attended a dental session thinking that she had something was wrong with her gums as they were discoloured- turns out the dentist told her, her gums were fine but that she had black ancestory that caused her gums to be 'black'.
 
I have a very strong memory of being in the family car at night in a strange neighbourhood and the car passing a "Dead End" sign. I thought I we were all going to die and made a big fuss.
Probably something my evil older brother told me.
 
ElishevaBarsabe said:
"I ran into this one in the first year of university. The professor didn't want to admit to herself that the ancient Greeks she admired so much polychromed their statues (and nearly everything else)."

I've never fully understood why this bothers so many people. Who could have actually LIVED with all that stark and bleached-out-looking white marble?

I understand that there are still a few flecks of paint remaining on weather-protected surfaces on the Acropolis temples.

Fortunately, there are a few Byzantine-American churches in which the internal decor gives at least a hint of ancient Greek color preferences.
 
TheQuixote said:
"our neighbour who was good friends with the family told my mother and anyone in the subsequent vicinity (i.e. the whole street) that she had attended a dental session thinking that she had something was wrong with her gums as they were discoloured- turns out the dentist told her, her gums were fine but that she had black ancestory that caused her gums to be 'black'."

And then there's the 80-year-old American lady whose physician advised her to get radiation treatments to eradicate a chronic and slow-growing carcinoma.

The woman was reluctant, she informed the doctor, because she'd heard that radiation can hurt future generations.

"But why in the world would you be concerned about that?" quizzed the physician. "You're certainly well beyond your child-bearing years."

"Oh, I'm not worried about myself, Doctor," the woman replied. "But I wouldn't want to cause the least bit of harm to my grandchildren out in California."
 
JamesWhitehead said:
"I must have been suffering from a feverish cold when I came to the strange conclusion that daylight came in throbbing pulses, each incrementally lighter or darker, before or after noon. Trying to explain this theory to my mother, I could only say that 'It gets light then it gets dark again.' She confirmed that this was indeed correct, but I don't think she had fully grasped my revolutionary thinking on the subject."

Now if only you had phrased it this way: "Mater, I've come to the conclusion after much thought and deliberation that the Nineteenth Century physicists were essentially correct in their speculations that Light is corpuscular in nature. But I believe that my current theories go considerably beyond those old greybeards, since they totally overlooked the Ante-Meridian/Post-Meridian Factor."
 
I believed men have three testicles. Continued to believe it until I was about 19 ... just thought my boyfriend was deformed and didn't want to embarrass him by mentioning it. Eventually the matter was raised. He insisted the fact he had only two testicles was perfectly normal. I still didn't believe him. Older women at work finally convinced me their husbands only had two testicles also and that this was all men are supposed to have.

Elderly neighbour told me that during her last surgery, her belly-button had been removed. She laughed and said it was lucky she hadn't had the surgery earlier in life, or she wouldn't have been able to have any children (chicken and egg confusion).
 
When my younger brother was eight years old he solemnly informed me that he'd "finally figured out the difference betwenn the United States and the United Kingdom - their Statue of Liberty is ALIVE."
 
I used to believe that when you put money in the bank you had your own box and that when you took money out they simply took it out of your box and gave it back to you.

Also, thanks to my older sister, believed for a long time that when moonlight shone on water you could walk across it.
 
Clouds

I believed up until at least ages seven or eight that clouds were as thick as cotton, and that if you fell out of an airplane all you had to do was to land on a cloud and simply remain there patiently until the cloud lowered you safely to earth.

I also believed that Saturn's rings were as solid as Plexiglas and that you could promenade around them as easily as along an ocean beach boardwalk.
 
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