The staff at that daycare both verbal and physically assaulted me from the age of 3 to 9 years old back in 2003., whenever I questioned God and their Christian beliefs.The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase, Separation of church and state, expresses the intent and function of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. During my childhood years, from the age of three to nine, I often questioned my female day care supervisors at my Christian daycare, In His Hands, about the proof of God’s existence. Asking them such questions led to punishments, from being put in time-out with toddlers, to physical beatings by other children saying that I did not believe in God. Due to my opinions about Christianity, I was treated as a subhuman and experienced alienation and isolation as a child.When I questioned my daycare supervisors about the proof of God’s existence, the occasional result of me doing so was punishment on a scale from time-outs to physical assault. One question I asked was, “If Adam made Eve, with the help of God, by removing one of his ribs, how did he survive such an act, and why do modern women not have an extra rib?” Another question I asked the teacher and other kids was, “If people ascend to Heaven and transform into angels when they die, how come I have never seen one when I am above the clouds in an airplane? Where is the proof?” Their response to these questions was putting me in time-out.One particular incident that made me feel isolated was when a daycare supervisor allowed one of the kids who occasionally bullied me to physically pound my sternum with the palms of his hands. When the incident occurred, the supervisor was a twenty-five-year-old woman, the bully who beat my chest was nine years old, and I was only six. The incident started when I stole blackberries from one of the bushes that grew on the other side of the fence from the daycare. When the other kids picked them, the daycare supervisors would tell them that they were sprayed with pesticides that could be poisonous and remind them not to eat them again. However, when I ate them for the first time and was caught, the daycare supervisor had everyone round up in a circle in the daycare’s playground while she called poison control. While that was happening, she instructed the bully to make me lie flat on my back on the ground while he pounded my chest with his palms, which really hurt and she told him to keep doing it, even if I asked him to stop and I was crying. The supervisor sat on the playground equipment and tapped her foot while she was waiting for the phone to pick up. She was not acting like my life was in danger. After half an hour, she told the kid to stop. Everyone laughed at me while she told them that she did not call anyone at all, and this was just to teach me a lesson for eating the blackberries and for previously offending the daycare by saying that I did not believe in God and would not follow the rules. This was apparently one of their ways to, as Brent Staples says, “… screen out troublesome individuals before there [was] any nastiness” (Staples 225). To this day, I wonder if she would have actually called someone if my life had been in danger from eating those berries.