I am not a believer....but I respect the beliefs of those who are...

Years ago, I had a neighbor lady who was pretty religious....
She had asked if she could tell my 6 year old daughter a bedtime story one night....
We had been friends for a while and she just loved my daughter, so I saw no harm...
Later, after the lady went home, my daughter came out of her bedroom....scared and white as a sheet!
She told me that the lady said that there was an evil devil that lived in fire, under the ground and if she wasn't a good girl, he would reach up and take her to Hell!!
OH! Was I MAD!!
What kind of BEDTIME story is THAT to tell a young child??!

That one event turned my daughter against being told bedtime stories of any kind....cuz she was always afraid there would be a devil involved!

My mother, having been very into church when I was little had me read a children's bible, by myself silently and during the day and this wasn't a storybook it was actually in bible format but in simplied language and contained small illustrations. Up until we moved into this house last summer we still had the thing. Where I'd used my laptop in the previous residence I could have looked at it while composing this post.

Today I'm not a bible believer and find religion to be pretty closed minded, which an expierence in 2008 made me realize.
A guy in my English class who was heavily Catholic and I became lunch buddies...essentially I suppose you could say I dated him. He'd expressed finding my attractive but he never seemed to discuss anything but religion and would try to get me to tour a Catholic church neighboring the campus. Luckily the bus gave me an honest excuse to pass every single time.
One day in an email discussion he told me he feared for my soul because I wasn't Catholic and don't believe divorce is a sin (FYI the divorce discussion had come about in regards to an essay we were assigned in class in response to the play we'd read, 'A Doll's House').

Inzanebraned, for this reason I can somewhat indentify with how your daughter responded to your neighbor's bedtime story. I was in my early 20's and that comment had freaked me the hell out, no pun intended. This guy was supposedly attracted to me and he tells me this shit (and in the same email conversation I had to defend my divorced mother to him)? I wanted nothing more to do with him after that and thankfully after that semester he'd changed schools so that was pretty much handled for me.
That's like the most fucked up thing in the universe to tell such a thing to a 6-year-old. I hope that woman never had her own children. I'd feel terrible for them.

I was never told bedtime stories. My mother isn't the most imaginative and was mostly invested in my reading books, she kinda took it upon herself to somewhat school me in reading comprehension. But still no reading was done at night.

Jesus said. Ye must b born again to enter heaven. It's a rebirth of the spirit not the flesh and of the will of God, not of men.

...religious spam? I can't tell.

My favorite bedtime story when I was little was panels from my big book of Peanuts comics.

I used to love the ones with Snoopy's brother. It was the Peanuts 2000 book and it had a ton of really fun, colored strips in there and I loved it so much! I think the book was either made in 2000, or it was a collection of the newspaper strips from 2000.

I think its closed minded when people say oh im not religious because religious people are stuck up or closed minded. Theres religious then theres spiritual. Religious people do what they do with no real meaning. Spiritual people believe in showing compasion towards others because thats what the bible teaches. You could be religious and still be a bad person. The meaning of my post is don't let bad experiences from other people let you think that ALL people who believe in the bible are some weird stuck up people who condeem anything that moves. Thats not how its suppose to work. I believe In God and the bible and Im not ashamed. I believe in treating everyone with kindness and compassion because thats what I was taught.

Ghost stories would be lovely.

I never said all religious people are closed-minded, but that the concept is. There are manners of believing which are lenient and that I can appreciate. My best friend of almost 20 years is Lutheran and another close friend of mine is Morman.
While I don't consider myself religious and lean more towards being most comfortable with evidence on a lot of subjects, there are certain aspects that I am willing to see as a possibility such as a God having created the first living organism. I concede to having no reason to deny a combination of God and Evolution being the basis of life.

Ugh, I wasn't starting a religious discussion here I was explaining why I understood someone's response to a neighbor telling their daughter a religious bedtime story.

I love gothic novels and I love to read them at night but it's not a great idea in the end because I want to keep reading. Oh, the twists and outlandish turns.

Lately, I've been watching ASMR youtube videos on my phone when trying to transition to sleep. Turn the the brightness all the way down and make sure the video is not in an autoplay queue that might startle me awake and gooo. I don't have ASMR, sadly, but many are lowkey/quiet/pleasantly time sucking. I kind of ran out of ones to watch, but I liked watching japanese youtubers go through their make-up bag. Simple stuff with a predictable pattern, not enough words are understandable to fire up my brain, but I can still glean something about the person and their life on the other side of the world.

---------- Post added 12-04-2015 at 11:06 PM ----------

Edited to add this, which I just remembered: The Gothic Novel 1790

My bedtime stories are usally told by my "Greeny Medication" and is properly affective ..
I don't know why but it speaks to me like no other.. I also sometimes take salvia wich is a spiritual drug and legal.
it makes you hillucinate for a minute period of time but feels like a half an hour.
Haha i have a GREAT story to tell anyone if their interested lol i just hate talking on my own so let me know if you wanna hear it !
Oh and by the way i'm Tim im nre to this THREAD i wanna check it out i'm very active unless i randomly fall asleep if that happends you lose me for about a few hours hehe ! :)
HI EVERYONE !