"I ran away from home just before my 16th birthday, stealing one of my parents’ cars as a home, because my family was trying to institutionalize me. I’d already been exorcized three times, at their churches. They would only consult Christian therapists, who told them that my depression and dissatisfaction meant that I was mentally ill. I got out, but leaving that way of life, that baseline assumption that women are worthless, was less easy. I sometimes rewatch the movies from the late 80s and early 90s, my childhood; that assumption was and sometimes is everywhere in popular culture, and it’s no wonder it took me a long time to start detangling the conditioning of my childhood.
I suppose that is typically the way these things go; my first and second husbands were unpleasant men, but I managed to divorce them. In the second husband’s case, that involved hiding from his family.
Along with my fight for survival, a seed of doubt kept blooming: why can someone call religion good, when it takes as a baseline experiences like mine? What kind of god would be satisfied with a situation like mine, like my mother’s?
Why? Why did my mother keep living with my father? Why did the people in the churches we went to always ask to be forgiven for the same damn things, and never seem to learn not to do them?
Why could my father believe that his actions were things which were good, right and necessary?"
From Pharyngula as usual