3mo ago

What weird false belief did you have as a kid?

208 comments

There was a place by the beach called Helenback.
My siblings and I in the car: Where are we going?
Mum (shouting): Hell and back!
I was an adult before I realised it had another name.
- When I was very young, my dad told me we were going to Miami. I thought he said "my Ami", which I assumed was a word for some kind of relative, like Auntie, Granny, etc.

That there's a loving God.
Now it seems clear that even if he did exist, he's just above average asshole
- I would argue that they would be fully evil depending on your definition of god.
  
  In my case, the abrahamic one. Narcissistic asshole
- I was a real piece of shit for a good handful of years when I was a kid because I believed I was destined for hell. I figured if I'm going to spend eternity being tortured I may as well enjoy life to the max, even at the expense of others. Because I'm already going to hell, so why not, right?
  Religion is fucking toxic, man. I hurt a lot of people and made a lot of decisions I can't recover from.
- See also, Just World Fallacy

That Everyone the Police arrest is a bad person.
- "The police are your friend". Maybe they where right, as im white.
  
  I'm so white that Casper the friendly ghost calls me a cracker. The thugs with badges are noones friends, except the owners. They never help any situation, and can literally only destroy more lives, and make every situation they come in contact with worse. This will always be true as long as they are profit motivated, which they are, at least in the US, and many other countries that copied us.

I thought that dogs were boys and cats were girls. No idea why.
Its funny, my niece made it to like 8 thinking that aunts were adults and uncles were kids. She had one young uncle, and me. Called me "Auntie Phanto." I still haven't lived it down.
- Dogs = boys due to energetic, clumsy and loud.
  Cats = girls due to classy, well-behaved and quiet.
  I'd guess it would be a trend similar to saying girls play with dolls and boys play with action figures.
  
  classy, well-behaved and quiet
  Except when they decide not to be, of course. Or when they're in heat.
- my niece made it to like 8 thinking that aunts were adults and uncles were kids
  This fits well with the accidental mild misandry in Catholic school when we learned about differences between men and women. One of the books we had to read said something like "men consistently outperform their female counterparts at making almost miraculously stupid decisions"
- Troy is that you?

That our blood was blue, but turned red when exposed to air and light. All because a teacher told us so.
- I heard this one from a teacher as well when I was very young! And it may well have been the same teacher telling us that blood was made of white blood cells and red blood cells, and I knew from my deep work in relevant fields (paints and crayons) that this combination did not result in blue.
  
  We were told that the arteries carry oxygen rich blood, that was red because of a high iron oxide content, away from the heart and lungs to the extremities of the body. At that point capillaries get involved, and it's really best not to worry too much here. Then the veins carry the oxygen depleted blood back to the heart and lungs to be reoxygenated, and that that blood appears blue through your skin. I think copper may have had something to do with the blue coloration, but that blood is also red in color, even if you managed to pull it directly into a vacuum tube. It just appears blue because of your skin or something.

That prayers appease god to make things better.
- it still blows my mind on a daily basis, the arrogance of humans to think they not only know what their creator-god wants but can sway "Him" with some fucking magic words
  
  I mean... If I was playing like The Sims and one of the Sims was like "yo can I get a new bike?" I might be like sure bro. From their perspective I'm a god that exists outside time and space.
  That's not really how Christianity talks about its God though, usually. But also like the story of Job does seem like a kid and his friend fucking with their game.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiAMzghLcMA
- I don't think we could classify it as "false belief" since we can't verify that statement.
  
  Sure you can!
  Get a coin, and flip it 100 times. Record each time it lands on heads/tails.
  Now get a devout believer, and have the believer continuously say devout prayers petitioning God to make the coin read heads. Then, flip the coin 100 times, and record heads/tails.
  Do statistical analysis to see whether there is a statistically significant difference between the control group and the prayer group. Pretty easy to verify if true.
  
  Even a recent book advocating the efficacy of prayer in treating disease (Larry Dossey, Healing Words) is troubled by the fact that some diseases are more easily cured or mitigated than others. If prayer works, why can’t God cure cancer or grow back a severed limb?
  – Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World (1995)
  See also https://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com/
  
  I’m completely on board with that, except for the “wish fulfillment”. I don’t know how it got twisted around that you could presume to tell God what to do or that he would - it seems so entirely inconsistent with anything else about religious beliefs
  So we have this all powerful and all knowing supreme being , right? And he’s got a plan for the entire universe and all of time, right? But he'll disrupt all of that to grant you a favor if you wish hard enough? Or you can blame him if something bad happens to you specifically, out of all the universe over all time? What hubris, what ego could make us think we’re in control and can use it for personal gain?
  
  We can verify that prair has no effect and is at best a placebo.

That America was the greatest country in the world. And truly, not trying to be political, but honestly the propaganda in Midwest America was real. I didn't know anything about other countries - except for we were better. We figured it out, we built the best system ever and everyone else wanted to be like us.
Now those are the people I see overseas who are about to get punched in a pub.
- That midwest propaganda is still around, just chewed out a coworker who said they'd be fine with everyone in Ukraine dying so that the US can 'have more money' and 'be independant'
  
  Good. Americana think they're so much different from everyone else and we're literally not. I hold a form belief that everyone just wants to go to work, get off work, they'd rather get a pizza for dinner but they're going to try to eat something better, are looking forward to their next day off, and when it comes they're going to go to their target equivalent for a boring errands run. I think about 90% of the people are in this category, just average working people, and that makes me feel a little more connected with them.
  
  How did they react to you calling them out?
- Definitely heard this all the time and went with it blindly. I grew up in Ohio, now live on the other side of the planet with zero intention of ever living in the US again.

I used to think that hair grew when it was watered - like a plant - and therefore showering was what allowed your hair to grow. No one ever told me that, I just assumed it to be true at a young age.

Volcanos being caused by overpopulation in hell.
- I thought elevator shafts were the gateway to hell

I thought that women drank tea and men drank coffee, because that was what my mum and dad did.
- Looking at my mum, dad and sisters drinking habits I can confirm this is true. Also, I'm NB and don't drink either
  
  Oddly, it's also true of me and my wife. Maybe I was on to something?
- My mom still drinks tea
  
  How deep does the rabbit hole go?
  
  I don't drink coffee, and rarely drink tea. Caffeine and I don't really get along, and I think coffee tastes bitter.
  My mother drinks coffee, and tea. My father drinks tea.
  One morning I got up before my mother did, and decided to make her a pot of coffee because of Folgers commercials, and wanting to be nice. I think I was 7 at the time. I thought that one scoop of coffee grounds = one cup of coffee, and the coffee maker clearly said that it made 12 cups of coffee.
  My mother wandered into the kitchen smelling fresh coffee and prematurely thanked me for making coffee for her. She added the cream and sugar that she always did, and took a sip. Her eyes shot wide open, and she sat the cup on the counter before asking me how much coffee grounds I had added to that pot.
  Apparently she only used 1.5 scoops of grounds, so I accidentally made something akin to cappuccino, except not. All I know is that because she taught me how to make coffee properly, I can still make a good pot of coffee for all the coffee zombies in my life, and my ADD wakes me up earlier than anyone that drinks the stuff.

That my parents never had parents. Sure, I had grandparents and saw them daily, but I somehow never realized that they were my dad's parents.

I believed that peas were the pupa of something similar to a butterfly or a moth. I refused to eat peas for years because I felt so bad eating little baby critters. I think my aunt might've "encouraged" me to think that.
- They are suspiciously similar in color and conceptually to Metapod the Pokémon
  
  Had to watch a YouTube video about Metapod to know what you were talking about. I don't think Pokemon existed when I was a kid but Metapod isn't a million miles away from what I imagined.

My mom told me that Dad went to work to make money, and I actually expected to see money making machines when I visited him at the office.
- Plot twist: OPs father actually works at the United States Mint (but in an office job)
  
  Unfortunately, he worked in a school district setting the routes busses take.
- I imagined work as a building with a big neon sign out front that said "work".

I swear a social studies teacher told us that most rivers tend to flow north to south. Young impressionable child I was, I of course filed it away as a long-term core memory -- right there next to PEMDAS, FOIL, and so on.
Then I mentioned it in college and got fucking embarrassed.
- Similar, I had one declare rivers flow towards the equator. Which is slightly better than claiming they all flow N to S, but still inaccurate.
  Rivers flow downhill. That's it. In case anyone else needs to check their mental model of the world.
- I was taught the same. I got extra credit for memorizing that the Nile River was a "notable exception".
  While I didn't go to school in Texas, our school district used material developed there. It figures.

I thought that apt-get was a wrapper around the apt command
- It's not?
- Wait... Someone explain things to me!
  
  Today I learned that apt is like apt-get but newer
  
  Dpkg is the low level tool for Debian packages.
  Apt-get is the original frontend for dpkg. It is a full featured tool that lets the user give commands to dpkg, along with apt-cache, which displays information to the user.
  Apt is a high level tool for user friendliness. It combines some features from apt-get and apt-cache, as well as adds progress bars and other quality of life features. It also strips down some features the average user doesn’t use.
  So neither is a wrapper for the other. They are two similar tools that do the same job. Apt-get is better for scripting due to being a more rigid tool while apt is nicer for end users.
  
  When I started on Debian, there was only apt-get. (And dpkg if you manually pulled .debs from somewhere).
  Then a little while later, there was aptitude, which was nice.
  apt the command didn't show up until 2014.
- Ah, the innocence of youth.

I thought that if you swallowed your gum, it would stay in your stomach forever, so you had to make sure to never do it because eventually there would be no room for food anymore.
Also, old CRT TVs had this static electricity sort of fuzzy feeling on the screen, and if you ran your hand over it, it would dissipate. I thought that by doing that, you were absorbing the TVs power and if you did it too much, it would eventually stop working.
Lastly, I believed with all my heart that all the pets you ever owned were waiting for you in heaven and it made me mad when my (very devout Catholic) grandma told me that pets and animals don't have souls and so they didn't go to heaven. I said if that was true then I didn't want to go to heaven! I'm atheist now, so I don't even believe that anyone goes to heaven, but if anyone deserves to go, it's all the kitties, puppies, and various rodentia I've loved in my life.
- My stomach one was watermelon seeds. My brother told me that if you swallowed them they would grow in my stomach and of course I believed him. There's plenty of water and nutrition in there and every time I open my mouth they could be getting sunlight.
- At my Catholic high school, one of the teachers who was a Dominican sister told us that animals can't go to heaven but it's possible for them to be recreated in heaven.
  I feel fine as long as my rabbit didn't go to purgatory or hell, but non-eternal souls are hard to relate to
  
  Pope John Paul II told her to kick rocks in 1990.
  https://missdarcy.org/from-rainbow-bridge-to-pearly-gates/
  Then in 1990, Pope John Paul II reversed that thinking and proclaimed that animals do have souls and are “as near to God as men are.”
  
  If you could instantiate soulless virtual beings in heaven for your amusement at will, it would be way less boring. You could recreate Mortal Kombat
- The Rainbow Bridge, is part of Catholic Dogma according to Pope John Paul II
  Then in 1990, Pope John Paul II reversed that thinking and proclaimed that animals do have souls and are “as near to God as men are.”
  Side note: At that time in my life, one of the schools I regularly attended as a non-Christian was a Catholic school that was called Pope John XXII, and I was legitimately confused as to how there were only 2 Pope John Pauls, while there were at least 23 Pope Johns. I think I thought that since a pope doesn't have term limits, that there must not have been too many more popes than British Prime Ministers. Having grown up, I can safely say that while I wasn't exactly incorrect, I was still criminally underestimating the sheer number of people that held both titles.

That people with a beard where poor people. I always felt sorry for them not able to afford a shaving kit.
- The preferred term is hobo-chic actually.
- I mean, it's a reasonable correlation if not a connection. Inaction is often cheaper than action, in time, effort, and money, and beard basically grows itself.

Oh yeah I had a few.
That the moon you see during daytime is actually Mars (I then repeated that to my big sister and she believed it for an embarrassingly long amount of time)
That the "up" arrows on traffic lights were for planes
- Me in the middle of my flight when my plane pauses in midair to wait for a traffic light
- Well Mars and The Moon are relatively similar in size compared to The Earth. Mars being about twice the size of The Moon, therefore making Mars roughly 1/2 the size of The Earth, and The Moon roughly 1/3 the size of The Earth.
  If Mars happened to be in an orbit roughly 500,000 mi or 800,000 km away from The Earth, it would appear that we would have two "Moons" the size of The Moon to the visible eye, giving the possibility of some absolutely crazy solar eclipse events. I don't think it would even drastically change the tides or the overall gravitational well of The Earth and its various current natural satellites all that much, thanks to the inverse squared law with gravity.
  Maybe that was what was going on with several different worlds in SciFi that had multiple massive moons....

I used to think "change" you got from a store was just the business being nice and making sure you didn't walk away without any money.
- Lul nice. I used to think that the cars turn blinkers were a form of rudementary GPS. You just hit the lever and the arrow would tell you what way you needed to go.
  
  That is some amazing kid-sized fridge logic. I love it!
- I feel like there's some truth in that.
  
  Lol they would take every penny if they could

Traffic lights were hand operated.
The small town where I grew up had one pedestrian traffic light for crossing the main road. There was a small brick shed next to that traffic light with no windows and a little door. When I was little I was convinced that was an operation's center where someone worked to turn the lights red or green.
In reality it was a power substation for the neighborhood, but I was seriously convinced that behind that door was a man looking at a TV screen and operating the traffic light at the right moment.
When we went to a larger town nearby, where there were traffic lights without a convenient mysterious building nearby, I told myself that the traffic light people were most likely working under ground, peeping through the drains.
I.. was good at making up answers for myself instead of just asking my parents.
- City Planner: Hey, I'm just reviewing the plans for the traffic light control shed and that there's no way for the guy inside to see what the traffic's doing outside.
  Architect, who forgot that windows exist: Err.. that's for .. well.. it's to ensure the safety of the operator during road rage incidents ... They'll be using CCTV to watch everything. Of course I know about windows haha..

I used to believe that if you just work hard you'll get ahead in life

As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster's sucking hunger.

I didn't understand time zones, but heard about "losing" or "gaining" hours when flying, so I thought that time moved differently while you flew, depending on if you were flying with or against the spin of the Earth.
- Is depends on your perspective.

When I was young and hanging with my great aunt's church friends, we were walking to the store. I went to link arms with my great aunt and her friend was like, "Hey, that's dangerous. You can't defend yourself. Someone could jump you." From that point, I assumed that anyone who was linking arms was, like, giving a show of dominance. Like, "Yeah, we're linked up, because we can still take anybody even with only one arm." Didn't change that mindset until I was in middle school after I tried to explain to my friend how dangerous walking with her boyfriend was because "how would they defend themselves." 🙃
- What a weird thing to worry a child about.
  
  Well, we were in the hood and it was getting dark 😂

I thought rabbits and hares were the same species but just the male and female name similar to cow and bull.
- Bugs Bunny has a lot to answer for.
  
  For too much or too little lipstick usage?

That my parents knew what they were doing, made good choices, and were reasonable people.
No, no, ... and no.
That I'd grow up to eat candy, collect baseball cards, play video games, and read comic books.
No (type II diabetes runs in my family), no (wtf is a baseball card anyway), no (video games were replaced with homework permanently), and — well, actually — yes.
I love a good comic book, graphic novel, and/or animated series.
- I'm in my 50s and playing plenty of videogames... There's a path forward
  
  Does the work you do, if you still work for a living, follow you home? And, if you have children, are any of them still in need of your assistance for feeding, bathing, and/or toileting?
  I'm really looking forward to being in my mid-50s. My youngest will be approaching 10. By then, I should be able to reintroduce video games to my life at that point.
- Yeah, I'm starting to ween my son off of video games. Everything that isn't video games is "boring" for the mere fact it's not a video game.

I used to think that the whole world was in black and white, just like all the old pictures and movies I had seen, then at some point we discovered color and turned it on! After that there were no more black and white pictures and movies anymore.
- Its weird that this is top answer and I was about to post the same thing.
  
  I've met a few people that believed this as a kid. My daughter actually just asked me about it a few months ago too! So we're not alone!
- The world can be a complicated place to a kid...

That Europe is a separate country where all the politicians live
- To be faaaaaaaaiir. They might as well

For a long time, i thought that people thinking that the pyramids were made by aliens was a joke and that the number of people who truly believed it was 0
- I kind of thought that too. Never heard the whackadoo theories until Ancient Aliens guy. They were around all along, but nobody mentioned it in college. B

I used to think the poles holding up traffic lights were hollow, and there was a person sitting inside throwing switches to change the lights while looking at a watch to keep the timing fair.
- I thought there was a little room under ground with people watching cameras underneath each intersection to control the lights
- Well you got the hollow part right, at least on some of them.

We found a dead baby bird. Was told most animal babies don't live to adulthood. Knew people were animals so it was likely me and most of my friends would be dead by 21
- I mean, that would have been true up until very recently in history.
- If you happen to find a dead bird in particular, please don't pick it up. They have mites on their feathers (skin?) that will absolutely jump on you and absolutely fuck up your skin. You can literally jump in the shower once the itching starts, and you will be in for something like localized poison ivy where those little microscopic (probably not, but they were so tiny I couldn't see them) assholes were, or at least wherever they bit you.
  I would generally caution against actually touching anything that is dead. Too many pathogens, nasty bacteria, and potential touch contracted illnesses.

That my grandma's name was "grandma".

I was like 6 years old when my dad randomly told me that if a player dies during a football game, the others players have to eat him before the game can continue.
I never watched sports so I didn't even question it lol

That enough hot water bath could work just as well as sunbathing for getting a tan. Hey, both things can burn your skin, it's perfectly logical!

That the Gulf War was in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the only one I knew!
- That's adorable, and I now wanna know if you're referring to 1993 or 2001
  
  By 01 I knew better!

I believed that you'd only get a finite amount of words in your life. So I didn't speak much and I would think that the annoying kids in school that always were talking through the teacher's explanation, would get their punishment later in life when they'd go mute because they would have used up all their words.
- Sounds like a lie parents would tell their kids to get them to shut up.
- Did you think that word limits or finite space in assignments existed to help you not reach your life word limit?

That my family cared about me and supported me.
- There absolutely can, and in many cases should, be a difference between your blood family, and your adult family.
  The former was chosen for you. The latter should only be chosen by you. I can easily tell you that excising certain siblings, aunts and uncles, and a specific cousin, from my life, my life has far less stress than it used to in my 20s. Now that I tell people that "this is my boundary, try to cross it at your own peril," and actually hold the line, I have far more family than what I was born into.

Ass cheeks were shit tanks.
- Daaaaamn gurl swing them big ole shit tanks!

Old people were always old

The crust on bread had more nutrients than the center. My dad didn’t want to cut my crusts off lol.
My uncle always swapped the words breast and best so my cousin mixes them up sometimes to this day. He said ‘breast friend’ at his brother’s wedding
- The crust doesn't, but for the love of all that is good and scientific, stop peeling your veggies people! Carrots and potatoes especially. Almost all the nutritional value is in the skin of those two, and probably most other, other than peanuts, legumes.
  Just remember to thoroughly wash the skin, and cut out any "eyes" on the potatoes or potential small scale rotting. Pesticides aren't something that your gut wants anything to do with.
  
  Almost all the nutritional value is in the skin
  Uhhhh, you might want to look that one up. For some veg, there is more fibre in the skin, but that's about it.

I always thought cigarettes contain tar, as in the substance asphalt on the road is made from. It always felt weird to me, why would they put it in the cigarettes but I figured maybe they need it so the tobacco doesn't fall out or something.
- Wait, they don't contain tar?
  
  In the same way that they don't contain ash. The tar and ash are produced by combustion.

That god(s) exist(s).

When I was six years old or so, my sister called me a "cosweb" and told me it was the worst thing ever. I completely believed her for a long time.
- Only a cosweb would think it's not real.
  
  Having legit flashbacks right now...

That, despite my feelings and emotions at the time, I would never be a girl. So, that was a fucking lie.

when i was a child, i was told that i would get worms if i ate raw brown sugar. i believed this for quite some time at least until i was 12.
- Woah, that unlocked a memory of how my parents said giving sweets to our dog would give him worms. Wonder how that pervaded so widely.
  
  Chocolate and diarrhea
- Username checks out

That there was a disembodied head that lived in the toilet at night.
- But there is though?

That all large salty bodies of water were called "the mediterranean sea."
- I had real trouble understanding why "The Great Lakes," weren't called The American Seas until I found out that Seas were large salt water bodies that aren't large enough to qualify as Oceans. Some more arbitrary bullshit as far as I was concerned.
  And I mean The Superior Sea, The Huron Sea, The Michigan Sea, The Erie Sea, and The Ontario Sea.

That I could dig to China
- Technically you could. It would be a marvel of engineering and would cost billions of dollars, and you couldn't go through the center of the Earth, but technically it is possible
  
  Do we have the technology to do that considering the increasing heat, gravity, and magnetic force as one goes deeper? I feel like anything we could do would involve lots of nukes that would basically destroy the planet in the process.

That the Mormon god was totally real

I do not know where I got this from, but I thought all dogs were male and all cats were female. I thought this while I had a dog named Betsy and a cat named Sebastian.
If that's not bad enough on its own, I think I was in first or second grade when I learned the surprising truth. I wasn't a dumb kid, either. I learned to read when I was about 3.5 yrs old and started 1st grade as a 5 yr old.
I'm now in my 70s and I still can't figure out where I got that from!

Trees make wind because whenever there was wind, they moved.

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