Although my dad never truly amounted to much, he was able to pass himself off as a big man (and physically, he was fairly large) who “had his own business” (which had been founded by my maternal grandfather, and which my dad didn’t actually own a single share of stock in—he served at the pleasure of my mother and grandmother).  As far as anybody could see, though, he was the top boss of a fair number of people, and deserved some respect for that—especially among the plumbers and electricians and other tradespeople he spent a large portion of every day with in local bars.
 
And of course, to a child, any adult is huge and formidable.  On top of that, my dad made it clear that he would not tolerate the slightest hint of disrespect from his kids.

He also never quite got the concept that his offspring were separate people from himself.   As a result, he did some strange things with us. 

He was very slightly wall-eyed (with one eye pointing a tiny bit outward), and as a child, he had to do exercises of visually following his finger in from his outstretched arm to touch his nose, in order to strengthen the muscles of his inner eye.  One day he decided that my brother, who had perfectly normal eyes, had the same problem, and made him do the same exercises—with the result that my brother went temporarily cross-eyed.
 
In my case, my dad responded to my brother’s near-constant verbal abuse of me not by trying to understand what was driving him to this troubling behavior, or by simply telling him to knock it off, but by sternly admonishing me that if didn’t physically force my older brother to stop, I would be bullied and tormented by everyone throughout my life.
 
In actuality, I was a big kid—taller than three-quarters of the boys in my grade, even though most of them were a year older than me—and I was exceptionally strong. Nobody taunted me or attempted to bully me, because they knew from our normal roughhouse play that I was the one more likely to win a fight, if things ever came to that.  But my dad had been small and scrawny up until his late teens and even a little beyond, and all he could see in me was his own childhood self.

Since our mother never said a word to intervene during the long, boozy blatherings in which our father berated my brother and me for his own weaknesses and shortcomings, we both grew up under the absolute power of a frequently deranged tyrant.

Hearing Episcopal priests addressing God in a way that strongly suggested to me that he was the same as my father didn’t exactly make me want to get close to this kind of divinity.