It was the disjointed, piecemeal feel of the thing that set me off. My parents sent me to Sunday School as a child, and I attended most Sundays until I was 12 or 13. Even then, I was troubled by the jumbled nature of what I heard.

On the one hand, there was the Jesus who was the Son of God, who did magic (performed miracles - same thing), rose from the dead and physically ascended into heaven.

Then there was the Jesus who went about preaching. Who told parables with common-sense meanings about kindness, fairness and general benevolence. Who said "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth", and lots of other egalitarian and fainly left-wing things.

Then, you have the Jesus of Acts and Epistles, a person who, it seemed, had very definite Views on how people should conduct themselves.

Finally, the Jesus Who Died For Our Sins, who seems oddly detached from the rest.

Time went on, as it has a habit of doing. With all the 'satiable curiosity of the Elephants' Child, I read. I learned about Vegetation and Solar cults, of the Divinely-fathered Dying and Rising King. I learned about the Stoics and their philosophy of correct thinking and living. I learned about the Essenes, and their beliefs about community, equality and benevolence. I learned about Gnosticism and Dualism. I learned about history. I pondered over 'many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore' and never met a talking raven. Never found a copy of the Necronomicon, either!

All these things rooted back to the various aspects of the Jesus the Sunday School teachers talked about. So I went down the rabbit hole to come up with an explanation or, given my mindset, a narrative that made sense of it all.

In terms of faith, belief and theology, these are important to many and that is to be respected. I remain curious and like to learn things, understand them if I can. For myself, I can only say that I am of the opinion that any being who self-identifies as a god and demands worship is probably unworthy of it. A being who is, to all intents and purposes, functionally a god would probably neither want nor need worship.