Skip to main content

I still struggle with fear of hell

By Gladys ~

I was raised in a deeply religious home in the bible belt. Let me first start off by saying that when I was little I genuinely enjoyed church. But as I got older, I began to dislike church. When you're a child, concepts like hell and eternal damnation don't scare you, because you're so young that they go over your head (or at least that's how it was for me). As time passed the concepts of hell became real and I was very scared. I can remember being about 10 and having nightmares about dying and going to hell. By the time I was 12 I knew I didn't want to be Christian anymore. I was also beginning to question a lot of things. For example:

If Jesus is so loving why should a person who's lived a good life, been a good person have to worry about going to hell? Its almost like being a good person isn't what matters, it's believing in Jesus that does.

Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth and the life; no one gets to the Father except through me". That made me wonder what happened to the millions of people who died before Jesus was ever born? I was completely mystified. Not only that, but Jesus comes off as a vindictive jerk. A lot of what he said really wasn't very loving when you think about it. Its like, "follow me, do as I say, or else" Yeah, that doesn't sound very loving does it? And then there's the fact that your lead to believe that your always walking a tightrope and can be damned to hell for all eternity for the slightest misstep.

I was baptized at 14, and looking back it was one of the worst decisions I've ever made. What made it such a bad decision was my reason for doing it. I didn't get baptized because it felt good; I did it solely to avoid going to hell. And were my parents responsible for sewing the seeds of fear? No, they never once told me I was going to hell or held it over my head as a threat. It was more than a decade of listening to sermons that taught the reality of hell and how easy it is to end up there that did it.

I still struggle with fear of hell simply because it was drilled into me for so long.I "came out" to my parents about how I was feeling, and it wasn't easy. They were saddened and confused to learn that I didn't want to be Christian anymore, but they were heartbroken to learn that what they had done with only the best of intentions had had the polar opposite affect of what they'd intended. My parents had absolutely no idea that I was feeling the way I was or that church had scared me. I remember my dad when I told him my feelings saying, "We didn't do this to scare you". But that's exactly why it took me so long to tell them. I didn't know how to tell them. I still struggle with fear of hell simply because it was drilled into me for so long.

The thing about those kind of beliefs is it doesn't take long for them to become implanted in your mind, but its nearly impossible to get rid of them. I hope to start therapy soon to help me totally dislodge these frightening beliefs from my psyche once and for all. But I'm doing better being away from the church and Christianity. I've actually found more peace not being Christian than I did when I was. And that's perhaps the greatest irony. A persons' faith, their relationship with God is supposed to be the best form of therapy; not what puts them in therapy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two