Asklemmy

Though I wasn't actually raised religiously, just the prevalence of religion in society led to many of my early theories have religious components.

I thought that between dying and being reborn you spent your time in heaven as an angel. While there, you could select your next parents from all the currently pregnant people on earth. I imagined giant 'rooms' full of computers in heaven, where every pregnant woman had a profile you could check out (mind, that was in the early 90s - I like to think I secretly invented social networking^^). Once you decided on a mother, you'd be kicked down into her womb and be reborn. I did realize pretty soon after that this theory doesn't hold water when you see that many children are not born into happy families, but for a short while I was certain I picked my mother from all the possible mothers around the world. She was very charmed by that :D

I thought that during commercial breaks the characters in the show I was watching were still doing things and I was missing it because the commercials were not pausing the show in the background but playing over top of it.

If you stir chocolate milk counter-clockwise you can separate the milk and chocolate syrup.

In order to learn how to whistle you had to eat enough pickles first.

Found a rock that kind of looked like a coin and thought I could carve it into a passable counterfeit and repeat enough times to become rich.

I thought that when you peed, your pee would go to a place where it was manually boiled on a stove, making it 100% clean drinking water, and then when you turned on the tap, they would get a garden hose and pour water into the pipe that gave you water. Somehow I assumed this all would be done manually with normal sized stoves and kettles, and that each tap had it's very own pipe.

I also thought that black people were just tanned, because colder countries had white people and warmer ones had black or brown people. Then I asked myself: why are there black people in cold places? I came to the conclusion that all the black kids in my kindergarten would eventually lose their tan and become white.

I thought when my mom said she would drop things off at Goodwill, she meant a giant, hollow wooden wheel full of tumbling clothing called Good Wheel. I imagined it looked a lot like a water wheel at a mill.

When I learned balls have a significant role in child-making my first though was women got pregnant by surgically transfering a man's testicle to their belly. Then I realized balls come in two's and I do in fact have more than one sibling

I thought vaginas were just hiding 20-30 tiny miniature penises inside, and that's why they couldn't use urinals because it would spray everywhere

I thought the abbreviation for pounds (lbs) stood for "lullables."

I have no idea why.

That America was good and a positive force in the world

When I was young, my mom told me that Dad went to work too make money. In my head, I had envisioned him going to an office and running machines that made coins. Imagine my disappointment when I got to visit him at work and there were no coin making machines.

Each video game copy was customized and knew exactly what you would try to do always.

Not from button inputs. That never crossed my mind. Literally thought it was some magical fake interactive movie and the wizards who made them accounted for everything and knew you better than you did.

Needless to say, learning about code and how you can make things read button inputs was a mind-blowing moment for me. I learned what the secret behind the magic was.

I have ever since then been far more curious on how and why things work. Learning about the methods behind the magics.

Because radio stations' DJs would say "and here's artist with song name", I firmly believed that one of two things must be true:

Radio stations had the bands always playing live for them

And/or

Radio stations would present a local DJ, but they would then tune in to the artist playing the track live for a larger station

What's even funnier about this is that my dad has at the time taught me how to use a tape deck to record radio and CDs to tape. So I clearly understood recording mediums. Just, the idea still lingered in my mind for a while.

Girls pee out of their butts.

That sun and moon switch places during day and night. Like in a cartoon.

I thought that everywhere was ocean except our town, my grandparents' town, and the interstate we used to get there.

When I was a kid and McDonald's started to became a thing here I was scared that Ronald McDonald would be at the restaurant. When I was invited to a birthday party and the parents wanted to take us to McDonald's I refused to go inside and the dad had to wait with me on the parking lot until my parents picked me up. I also figured that he could potentially be at Burger King, so I never went there either.

In Germany they put up mobil speed control and radio stations warn you about that. In German them doing this is called "blitzen" which is the same word as lightning. As a child I thought they were warning very precisely where lightning strikes were happening.

That God was real and had existed for all eternity.

I remember watching Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. I remember that I thought he was wearing some sort of muscle prosthetics bc I thought people couldn't be that muscular. It's funny because by today's standards he wasn't buff at all.

The world was in black and white shortly before I was born.

There is a god who created the world and watches our every move and we as humans are fallen creations who can't live up to his super holy expectations with our sinful lives. But don't despair just yet because that holy god has set up a blood sacrifice solution involving his own son and all you have to do to not end up in eternal damnation is to believe in the blood magic of a god for which no evidence exists whatsoever outside of the ancient myths of primitive bronze age men - a god who chooses to remain hidden for some weird reason although he apparently wants to be worshipped and believed in. Easy right? Also, if your life isn't working out quite right for some reason, that's certainly your own fault because the lord's blessings are very dependent on you doing those very fuzzily defined Jesus-ing activities right and you're quite obviously doing something very wrong, have sins in your life, aren't believing hard enough, doing it with an impure heart or whatever...

You couldn't make this shit up if you tried!

That meritocracy exists.

Cows that are completely brown give chocolate milk.
My mother said it as a joke, but at the time it made complete sense to me. By logical extension, there must’ve been a farm with pink cows for the strawberry milk.

Everyone in the whole world is the world champion of something. Could be something normal like running, or jumping, but it could also be something really niche like solving the Rubik’s cube with your tongue while being under water with your hands tied behind your back. You just need to find what you’re really good at and that might be your thing.

I used to think that how your belly button looked was based on a surgical procedure following birth, and "innie" vs "outie" was an indication of a surgeon's skill. I was legitimately surprised when my son was born and you find out they clamp the umbilical cord and just wait for it to fall off.

I thought that all languages were actually the same, just our ears differed. So e.g. as a native German speaker, I thought all people 'speak' German (I.e. make the sounds of the German language), but the translation of sounds into thoughts by the ears would only work when the source was 'my version' of the language. Very hard to put that into words, I just realize...

Another thing was that I had my own religious philosophy. I believed in reincarnation, and thought that all life was just a giant circle where you would be reborn as your own worst victim. Only when you have lived a victimless life, you would ascend into heaven. My go-to example back then was if you stepped onto a worm you will be reborn as a worm that is being stepped on. This one has horrible victim blaming implications when you think about it but in my childlike naivety I thought it was very fair.

I thought the priest at church was Jesus.

I thought that actors on TV shows and movies were acting in real time, and that they had a special ability to do the exact same thing over and over again.

As I grew in the Spanish speaking world, I also believed that Hollywood actors spoke Spanish, and that their voices changed dramatically only by switching languages.

I was a towhead, which means I was born blonde and it turned to brown as I got older. When I first started noticing my hair turning darker, I asked my mom why and she told me it was because I ate too much peanut butter. I stopped eating it for about a week until I decided that I loved peanut butter more than being a blonde.

That god was real and he actually gave a fuck about me

I started learning BASIC when I was 7 and used to think that the POKE command was a magical incantation that could do anything. Like you could make an entire game with a single POKE. You just had to find the right one.

That night was caused by really thick clouds. I think I saw light through dark black clouds during twilight and assumed night was caused by black clouds covering the sky. I went to test this theory by flying out of London at night but I fell asleep before we took off.

I used to think all food for adults were called Sad Meals, as opposed to Happy Meals (like at McDonald's).

I thought some wild stuff as a child that feels more fantastical than strictly dumb. Like I thought everyone was psychic except me and could hear my thoughts. I thought time worked differently depending on who I talked with. I thought the earth was both flat or round depending on where you were standing. I'd often get dreams and reality confused too. For some reason I thought dogs were people who had been cursed into becoming pets, probably because of me seeing the donkeys from Pinocchio. I thought half of people were robots fueled by pieces of the sun they'd pluck out of the sky.

This one is common, but I thought water simply phased through your body if you touched it. There was an episode of Bill Nye where he mentions that water "goes through your hand" and says it just like that. So I thought water simply phased through hands.

I think I was just abused as a kid and neglected

Because of Barbie dolls, I used to believe that girls didn't have nipples

I remember reading a Robin Hood book when I was maybe 6 years old, and it mentioned that Robin Hood hated 'bloodshed.' I thought this was an actual shed or something where people went to fight. I hadn't learned the other meanings of 'shed' yet.

I thought the people in movies lived in the video cassettes. I would only watch a video every once a while cause I didn't want to get them tired and or take them away from their families.

Was like 9 when I realized I was wrong. Lol.

Professional wrestling was real

There was a brief moment where I thought video games had to program every possible combination of pixels so it could react appropriately to what I was doing at any given time in a game. I had no idea how things rendered. I didn't know they were individual sprites that animated separately. Thought it was all just one big thing and they had to draw every single possibility with nothing dynamic going on.

Then I played Wolfenstein 3D on PC and realized how impossible that would be in 3D. Funnily enough, those little pocket games they had in the 80s and 90s like Game & Watch kinda were doing exactly what I thought every game was doing, but they were much simpler games for a reason.

I was assured that power-hungry politicians would face checks and balances, and get voted out for saying insane things.