Fear of hell?

Watcher
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Fear of hell?

Ok, guys and gals.  This particular thread holds some importance to me and is something that has been swirling in my mind that I would really care to hear from some ex-theist atheists.  Freeborn atheists (My little term for those atheists that were not raised in a religion) are free to post as well.  I love all of you.  However, this question is mainly pointed to ex-theist atheists.

Have those of you who at one time in your life truly believed in heaven and hell, were you ever frightened or even terrified at the idea of hell?

I was.  I wanted to get baptised at the age of 5.  I told my mother so but she thought I was too young to understand.  For the next two years I had frequent nightmares because I believed back then that baptism was required in the faith for salvation.  I would lay in bed trembling over it.  I cried sometimes.  Finally my mother relented when I was 7 because I tearfully pleaded to her that I didn't want to go to hell and to please let me get baptised.

Does any one of you have similar stories?

Thanks


MattShizzle
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I was. I used to have

I was. I used to have nightmares fairly often about going to hell - sometimes it was just being in fire, sometimes it was just being sent there and I'd wake up before arriving - I clearly remember one when I was about 15 where I was shown a huge room that had every torture device humans ever invented and told I would be going through every single one of them over and over again. Once I really started doubting I had them less often, and once I considered myself agnostic and was really an atheist they were very rare - by about age 25 when I really only used the "agnostic" title because I thought "atheist" meant you were 100% sure no gods at all existed and was sure the Christian god was pretend they stopped.

I had a few in my younger years of going to heaven and meeting Jesus, one when I was about 5 where I actually saw him walking in my yard and said "Jesus Christ" and he came up and yelled at me for it!

I remember another where I went to hell but begged god to reconsider - he actually did and heaven was working in a store at the mall (I remember thinking - man, heaven kind of sucks!) - I was like 12. One time when I was maybe around 17-19 I had another one where all kinds of weird stuff was happening - then there was a picture of Jesus and he turned his back on me - this was when I really started doubting Christianity but wasn't sure.

Yeah, some of these were pretty weird and pretty fucking funny, but at the time they weren't!

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Jello
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It used to keep me awake at

It used to keep me awake at night.

I believed that to be a proper christian, one had to go to church every sunday, pray and read the bible every day. And even though I believed in Jesus, God and all the rest, I'd had stink experiences at church (plus it was boring as fuck), so I hated the place and wouldn't go. 

When I tried reading parts of the bible, I always just happened to open it up on the  disturbing parts i.e. leviticus. So I wasn't too keen on actually becoming a bonafied "christian". But I was absolutely terrified of dying, because if I did, before getting my shit together and getting born again, I'd go to hell, for certain. I was quite relieved when I stopped believing in that shit.

I still have that nagging fear that maybe it's all true, and maybe I am going to hell, but i know that it's just left over psychological baggage. Most people born into secular (atheist) families don't have that eensy weensy doupt. I assume.

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For me, I think the idea of

For me, I think the idea of hell was so counter-intuitive that I never completely internalized the idea.  I would tell you that I believed in hell, and intellectually, I did, but I'd never really stopped to think about it because it was literally so terrible.

What I was afraid of was demons.  There was a stretch of time, maybe several weeks, maybe several months -- it's hard to gauge time from when I was a kid -- where I hardly got any sleep because I was afraid demons would possess me.  The thing is, this pastor was an expert on demons, and he told us impressionable young prepubescent kids that if we thought impure (sexual) thoughts, demons would have an open door to possess us.  What sucked was that when my glands kicked in, sex was pretty much all I thought about, and since I wasn't married, every one of those thoughts was bad.  It was especially bad at night, because when my mind wandered as I was drifting off to sleep, my thoughts were out of my control.  I was terrified that a demon would get me right then, so I stayed awake.  I read, I played nintendo, I played my guitar with the headphones so I wouldn't wake my parents.  Only when sleep deprivation caught up with me did I go to sleep.  When I woke up, I always prayed fervently that if there were any demons in me, that Jesus would please cast them out, because I didn't mean to let my mind go when I went to sleep.

Unfortunately, I'd also been taught that Jesus didn't listen to the prayers of the demon possessed because they'd already chosen their path.

It was a bad time to be me.

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

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Nope

I guess I was one of those ones you here about all the time from the thumpers...I never REALLY believed any of it, even though I was dunked twice, once Pentacostal, once S. Baptist... it just never became an internalized concept for me.

 

LC >;-}>

 

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Conor Wilson
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Yes, I did truly believe in Hell.

Not only that, but it did scare me.  Personally, I didn't have the kind of outward reactions that you and MattShizzle described, but I think it scared me profoundly in a different way--I absolutely *had* to know which religion was the "true way."  Of course, once I latched onto Catholicism, I bounced back and forth between being scared of going to Hell for some of the heretical thoughts I was having from time to time, and also scared of going to Hell on a what-if-the-Catholic-Church-really-is-wrong basis.  I actually became kind of useless at my job in the Navy, in part because I was obsessed with religious research.  It's embarrassing (sp?) now, of course, and I regret the lost time.  Ah, well...live and learn.

 

The more and more I think about my journey toward deconversion, the more and more that "Not this shit again!" starts to look like genuine enlightenment to me.

 

Conor

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There was about a two month

There was about a two month transition period from my christianity to atheism and in that time I constantly thought about spending eternity burning in hell. Looking back I can't believe I was scared but then again I was raised thinking hell was a real place.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan


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I believed without doubt

I believed without doubt there was a hell,and I was scared of it. I would often 'recommit' myself to make sure my soul wasn't in danger of being backlidden and going to hell. Like Hamby, I was also very scared of demons. Even in my later teens I lost a lot of sleep as I was too scared to close my eyes at night. I frequently had nightmares and would stay awake from 2am to sunrise sometimes,just laying in bed.

What I want to know is how can a christian read these stories and justify the brainwashing and terrorising of  children with stories of a place like hell?

Psalm 14:1 "the fool hath said in his heart there is a God"-From a 1763 misprinted edition of the bible

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Yes, I used to have

Yes, I used to have nightmares. The worst was after I read Dante's Inferno. I remember tring to force myself to believe cause Hell was so terrible.

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Oh yes! The first books I

Oh yes! The first books I remember being read as a child were bible stories, and one of the books had this picture of the devil being thrist out of heaven into hell and it really scared me! I think that the fear of some sort of eternal suffering is what kept me from really coming "out" as an atheist for so long.


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  Just for the record,  NO

  Just for the record,  NO ..... water on me , was always a silly thing , it actually made me sad for people .....  I really just thought as a kid that all gods love me ..... that I was good , and all that was "out there" would love me .....

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Hell is people

 

Hell Is People!

 

Can't remember the first time my mother said it to me - most likely in response to a tearful repetition from me of some lurid and terrifying description of the place (complete with sadistic threats etc) that I had just been fed at school that day and which were a mainstay in the curriculum of my religious "teachers".

 

But she was right - when compared to those living hells that people themselves are capable of producing all too easily on this earth, the cartoony depictions of a mythical hell that (rather limited) christian imaginations have churned out over the years are not only unfrightening, they are an insult to the intelligence.

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I must have been afraid of

I must have been afraid of hell when I was very young. Now, I am a "freeborn atheist", but the only schools that were available in the village where I lived where, at the time, Christian- and I don't think my parents realized hów Christian.

The way the teachers tried to deal with the children from atheist parents was to tell us about Hell. A lot, and with lots of colourful detail. I remember only a little of it, but I do remember having horrendous nightmares and even being a little afraid of my parents (having also been taught that they were evil witches and a reason whý I was supposed to be destined for Hell etc. Anyway, I thought they might want to poison me and boil me in a cauldron, the fantasy of small children can run in all kinds of very, very weird directions)


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I passively believed because

I passively believed because others believed. It wasn't a deep belief but more like a superstition, like "don't step on a crack".

Long after I gave up on my theism, right when I began to seek out other atheists on line, the residual effect of hearing over and over and over my entire life that hell existed, I did have BREIF fear that when I clicked on the atheist network, I thought "What if I am clicking on a cult website?"

Of course it was absurd for me to think that, but the lifetime of hearing repeatedly that a hell existed, still had it's fallacious grip on me. I have of course since completely lost that superstition.

 

 

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Hell is actually what got me

Hell is actually what got me to start rejecting the fundamentalist beliefs that had snared me for years.

What happened for me was that I had a daughter. I loved this little girl more than life itself, and one day it occurred to me: "Could I send her to Hell?"

And the answer was of course, no.

I tried to imagine her serially raping and torturing several children to death. In other words, the most awful, horrible crime I can imagine. Then I imagined what my reaction might be.

I could imagine being horrified. I could imagine turning her in to the police. I could even imagine understanding that she had to be executed to protect the world from her savagery.

But eternal torture? No way.

And that was the thing that started my rejection of Christianity. I put 2 and 2 together and realized that I was being expected to worship a deity that was morally inferior to ME.

I went for a little while with the apologists' version of hell..a world without the presence of God, but that was so completely incompatible with what I read in the bible that it made no sense. It's one thing to say Genesis Chapt 1 is allegory. That is obvious. But there's no getting round Hell as a place of eternal punishment.

So yes, I did believe in Hell, and it kept me in the church a good bit after I had lots of doubts. But eventually, that was the piece that drove me from Christianity forever.

 

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Whenever I think of hell it

Whenever I think of hell it seems so weird to me,

what are they going to do to me in hell?, burn me?, stink of sulfur really bad?, stimulate the tips of my nerves to trigger electric response in my brain?, doesn't that seem so.. well.. primitive?, and this thing goes on forever?, those mechanisms are in my body to detect danger and god is sorta abusing them to make me suffer?,what happens when the human race is eradicated?, everyone remain in heaven and hell forever?, is there really a crime worth eternal punishment?, could such a loving and caring god really torture it's OWN creation, infinitely?

It just seems to stupid, small electric signals throughout my nerve system is the worst the almighty god can do to make me suffer?, or maybe it's the people who wanted to force religion on others had no other horror that people could relate to beside physical pain.

Also, if the bible is true and there is a hell, I'm sure Satan and his devils really aren't that evil they're just the opposite of god which if you've read the bible isn't that pure and good to begin with.

Those are just some of the things I think about, not really addressing anything said -  I don't think it exists at all but alas religious brainwash never goes completely away.


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I never really got to the

I never really got to the point of being too emotionally invested in the religion I was raised.  I went through the motions and what not, and felt it was important, but I think I saw them more as steps in life, or social events more so than religious events.

I don't think I was ever a full-on god-fearing, hell-fearing catholic.


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I remember having this vivid

I remember having this vivid dream of the Apocalypse. I woke up in my house and looked out side to see what seemed to be a morbid medieval scene of decay people walking around eating chunks of rotting bodies parts off of carts being pulled by undead horses. Then I was chased around my house by this vulture like demon trying to drive me outside. When outside I remember seeing these flying plasma manta rays swooping down trying to suck out my soul. It was pretty disturbing.

I now figure that was my mind processing the last of my "programming" before freeing me of all religious guilt.

 

I always figured it was like being sick, you not truly better until you vomit all the toxins out of your system.

 

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Thanks for all the comments

Thanks for all the comments guys.  I used a lot of your stories (after I sanitized them) in my first blog about this.

http://www.rationalresponders.com/holy_hate_and_terror

 

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..

I was raised practically as a Christian, mainly because of a local habit. Now I realize it wasn't really a tough christianic regime, for example, one neighbours had a twins, several years older than me (we used to play together sometimes), and they had at home visibly placed quite a sinister cat-o'-nine-tails. When I was once at a visit, I had a closer look at it, and it was black, rather small, thus not meant for the visual effect, but for actual usage. They were very strongly religional, actually next to their house, they had a local sunday school building, where we kids always went on the sunday, they practically ran the place, with a help of local evangelic preachers.
My grandma is strongly religional, she always was. Dunno how it's in english, but when she wanted to say, that we must love, obey and listen to God, (or something like that) she literally used the phrase "to be afraid of God". It really made no sense to me, to be afraid of God, the source of all good on the world?  That's absurd.
There were also things, which no preacher on the Sunday school ever talked. I mean, in my young age, like 4-6 years, I observed things like a telekinesis, UFO, and all the time was with me my sensitivity, to what is today called psi-ball technique. It was just beyond what all these preaching neighbours in sunday school could even think about. (fortunately I kept my mouth shut, otherwise I'd see if exorcism is still practiced in this country, maybe not, it's civilized place) I always wondered how can they just go on and on always with the same book for all these years, like the whole universe would be in there, and yet, it was all the same or similar every year and sunday. Now I guess they had quite a lot of chapters to avoid, they didn't emphasize Hell too much, they didn't need to. I was of course afraid of Hell as everyone else, but never all the time for long, just sometimes when I thought of it, all these incoherences and holes in religion I remember, surely weakened this belief. Probably it was just a protective disguise from parents for me and my two brothers to have a happy childhood in the neighbourhood, but they actively prevented us from being baptisted, which is a clear message. Anyway, my parents never actively kept with the christianic community (just that my mother knew most of them for all the life since school), they just sent us to the sunday school and sometimes we prayed in the evening, that's all I remember. At the same time, they had a bookcase full of books of eastern mysticism, meditation, yoga, chakras, and so on, long before I was born. I was always quite a bookworm, and believe me, these books gave to me a lot more of sense than a christianity. What finally saved me from the Sunday school? A TV, because parents probably decided that keeping us kids away every time from sunday TV tales is too big effort for how miserable christians we all were.

Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.