My family's low-key church growing up stressed helping others as per Jesus, and gawd as a source of comfort. When I read the truly horrible teacjphings some of you endured, I feel sick.

It just amazes me how many very intelligent people believe that religious nonsense.

He who digs a pit for others to fall into ends up in it himself

I agree with you. For me, the whole male deist God,' was sort of a word-based being who was threatening if you wouldn't stay in line. I think I got good at getting away with stuff, more than instilled with anything socially responsible. I think that's part of the mystery cult. I mean in the Hebrew faith there is a prohibition against uttering the name of god. In the Roman Catholic, and Orthodox churches while there are plenty of images of saints, and angels, and of the key characters in the story, but it will be very rare you find depiction of the Big Guy himself. And then only in the hands of geniuses like Michaelangelo and Stephen Colbert.

I thought there was a man in the sky that watched everting I did and said and if I broke his rules I would go to a place of burning and pain and suffering and screaming for ever and ever .But if I was lucky I might end up in purgatory for a few hundred to a thousand years .

This makes good sense to me. A lot of it depends on if your parents were particularly religious and everyone went to church or not. Some of it also depends on whether you were Evangelical or Catholic, or not, or from some other religious stripe. I had no fears of hell but it took me many years to decide that this was all made up. That includes hell, sins, and the invisible man who knows all and lives in the sky.

And the truth shall set you free.

The church I grew up in isn't shy about telling kids that hell is real and we all deserve to go there. They start young because they want them to be ready to be saved as soon as they reach the age of reason. I was definitely afraid I'd end up there. What scared me the more was learning about Abraham and Isaac. I spent ages four and five losing a lot of sleep, thinking that my dad was such a good xtian that if god asked him to kill me, he would. I still remember figuring out that god was just fucking with Abraham. I realized that meant god wasn't good and started think maybe the rest of what they told me about him was bullshit too.

I recognise that. Fortunately I didn’t buy into it because i was a pedantic child and it didn’t make sense.

My main concern was to work out what I was being saved from. Still don’t know!

Interesting. I remember talking to god and assuming he was always watching over me and my thoughts, but had a hard time believing in hell because it seemed too earthly. And that led to: why were the depictions of hell and heaven so similar to volcanoes and clouds? It just felt man made at a very young age - sometime between santa and 12.

At least for hardcore Christian groups, like evangelicals, fear is far and away the most powerful indoctrination weapon for controlling members. I have vivid memories of Sunday school in the FIRST FUCKING GRADE that intentially scared the Hell "into" us by vividly describing book of revolation armageddon bullshit and telling us we needed to repent of our sins to avoid being left out of the rapture. I am still angry about that fear tactic on utterly vulnerable little children. They deserved to be convicted of child abuse.

That's what did it for me. I saw good people who were not Catholic or even Christian and I asked the Brother Gilbert and his boyfriend Brother John (they lived together in a small apartment in the neighborhood. the Brothers of The Holy Cross allowed them this privacy) if its true these people were going to hell?
This is 1985 when the Catholics had just made nice with the Jews so they weren't supposed to say that anymore and yet they silently acknowledged with a nod, but I was told that wasn't nice to bring up. The brothers were older, 60'ish. I thank them, now, for being old school hard-core Catholics. Because by them admitting that these people were going to go to hell and my seeing good people who were better, morally, than even my dad, I knew the whole thing was full of shit. Say what you want about the ghetto, but in the ghetto even a 13yr old knows when they hear something that's that full of shit!

I would later learn the brothers were gay and that only confirmed it. Any society that makes you live a lie to promote another lie has nothing you can benefit from.These men may have believed. And so they must have spent thier lives in constant penance as they risked burning in eternal hell for each other, that's love, brother..........pun always intended.

I believed in an all powerful,
all knowing,
Timeless,
All loving,
Perfect god.

The exact god that does not exist in the Bible nor could exist.

Do you still believe in hell?

Controlling you through fear, the oldest method of having people do your bidding and o yeah, it'll cost you pretty rocks. (money)