Lies We Tell To Children: Blasphemy.

My father was raised by Jesuits and fed on philosophy. His Catholicism was rich, historical, and dead. It was a tradition to be passed on, poetry and ideas, but, before he took ill at least, not a comfort, not something by which to be restricted. My mother was the youngest of five, the daughter of a Catholic and a Jew. She took her mother's Catholicism, but I'm not sure she ever felt as if she truly understood it until a few years ago, at which point she realised that the Church had few nice things to say about either of her children, and she left it. The knowledge that she chose us over a god is a gift so great I don't have the words to thank her for it.

When I was very young, I watched the Disney film Fantasia for the first time with my father. The final scene is an animated Christian afterlife which seemed, at the time, frightening and dull in succession. Before that, I was introduced to Olympus. There were creatures: horses with the torsos of bathing young women, dancing boys with the legs of goats. And there were gods! Funny drunken things, a bearded old man throwing lightning in his rages. And these chimeras were wonders, but stranger still was that my father knew every one of their names. The power of this knowledge seemed infinite. I learned the word pantheon at three.

My sister and I were both sent to a Jewish pre-school and kindergarten and spent a subsequent twelve years in Catholic schools. I was smart and obedient and shy, and so at first school was, like the afterlife I'd been promised, terrifying and boring in stages. The rituals and prayers, however, were mysterious, exacting. There were screaming prophets, strange pacts and sacrifices. I spent grade-school rushing through my work in order to have more time to read, and my favourite books were the lives of the saints, adventure tales of emperors and virgins and martyrs, and classical mythology, ancient songs of heroes and shape-shifting and rape.

Due to my parent's choice to condemn my sister and I to a youth of near constant religious training, we learned that these cosmologies, strict, contradictory, jealous, and all-encompassing though they were, were not exclusive. No culture, then, was stupid or dangerous or wrong. Everything was real. Everything was permitted. In religions and mythologies, then, there were no lies, only choices.