And you bribed him with cookies and milk

You tied my internal moral compass to this morally ambiguous father figure: Santa. He could see me when I was sleeping, knew when I was awake; he knew when I was bad or good, and in order to recieve my reward, I had to be good, for Godlight's sake. When I realized there was no such thing as Santa (oops... spoiler alert), I graduated from Godlight to God, the real God who, in addition to knowing my thoughts and holding the keys to my reward, could also fuck with my life in major ways, as in withholding good things, advertantly leading me to bad things for my own good, or even taking my life whenever he wants. He was cast to me by my religious community as Santa, Scrooged. 

I liken God's control over my life to a terrorist/hostage situation. God, in my story, is a terrorist who held me down for 20 years and forced his ideology into my mind. I, in my story, am a hostage who takes this "love" unquestioningly, hoping to survive it, learn from it, and perhaps even learn to identify with this godmanchild who gives me the silence treatment for long periods of time, casts me into his displeasure when I'm bad, and even interrupts me with pangs of guilt when I'm masturbating. 

Now that I'm a full-blown deviant, with no real hope of ever gaining entry into their hypocrit's playground, and as I stand and take a long look back at what I've learned from having endured so long among the righteous, I consider having come into my own a feat within itself: a march upon my own warped sense of righteousness and its unwavering critique of a culture with God splayed across its money, in its anthems, and from the mouths of fundamentalists who, for irony's sake, see life as though through a dark glass. Who is this God, and is he holding love, goodness, and decency hostage on a couch somewhere, bending them to the will of the masses?