That link goes to something that looks not quite right. Did you mean [recoveringfromreligion.org] ?

Brilliant contribution

I was a preministerial student in the Methodist Church. I was as indoctrinated as anyone but my recovery was complete.

@anglophone did I put >com?
Thanks for the repair

I had one like that!

@BirdMan1 Only one!

@Atheist3 That was fucking enough, thank you. My current marriage, of 36 years, is solid and wonderful.

I had the Fear of God and the Fear of Hell put into me at age 10. It terrified me at the time. It was at age 30 that I realised that my tormentor was an evil liar. He was also my headmaster.

I am one of the lucky ones: with the intellectual realisation that I had been lied to my fear of hell "went to hell" (sorry for the dreadful joke) and ceased to exist. If that headmaster was still alive today, I would reduce him to a quivering wreck in two minutes.

Totally agree!

I was never religious. Neither were my parents.
But everybody knows the werewolves are nonsense.
Its the Mummy you should be afraid of. And we know they exist!

@PondartIncbendog Mummies do exist, I have seen them many times in museums, but do they walk among us?

What one lacks a belief concerning, and what one FEELS to be true can vary independently. I've seen it. It's operant conditioning, and it's brutal.

@mordant If you don't 'feel' it to be true, you don't truly believe it, IMO. It's like people who say they're not superstitious but still knock on wood to deflect bad luck.

@sterlingdean You give credit to humans for being more logical and self-consistent than they actually are.

I suppose one can make a technical argument that a person with this irrational fear is Not a True Atheist but I don't know what purpose it serves other than to exclude them and fault them for something they don't have complete and instant control over. Learned and conditioned beliefs do not go away instantly for most people just because they change their conscious thinking.

@mordant Part of becoming and Atheist is usually a gradual realization that all the shit they told you to be afraid of is not real. For Me, it never really was so I've never feared hellfire and damnation. I can't fathom how anyone could. once they know the facts of the world.

@sterlingdean Understandable. I think the problem is that most theist claims are inherently non-falsifiable, rooted as they are in the "supernatural", about which actual data is unobtanium. As such, while there's no reason to think any of their gods or other claims, including hell, are real, there's no way to disprove them either in some absolute, objective sense. Since eternal perdition is a pretty consequential claim, which in the vulnerable indoctrinated from the cradle often produces a deeply existential dread, the only thing that would immediately relieve it is absolute proof that there is no hell (or at least, no supernatural). But it's non-falsifiable.

The thing that DOES relieve it over time is just what you're talking about ... new "ruts" get worn in the brain and it stops compulsively thinking about what is essentially asserted evangelical torture porn.

A complicating factor is the social cost of deconversion, which can cost a person the only support system they have ever known, including often the partial or complete rejection of immediate family (and the loss of status and respect in the wider community, if you live in the Bible Belt -- it can even render you unemployable). So you can't easily avoid all the innuendo and guilting and social pressure to "come around" and stop talking this atheist nonsense, and this is a terrible double whammy. Not only do you have to process a great deal of intellectual change, but also the grief and loss cycle associated with the social cost, and you have to go it alone in many cases.

If I see a spider, I get my shotgun and pickup truck and run that ungodly thing over and shoot it.
I should have removed it from the bedroom first..........

Why the hell would you want to step on a spider ? Leave the poor thing alone. They do a lot of good .How would you like it if Monty Python's giant foot squashed you into the ground.

@Moravian I leave them alone outside. I'm encouraging natural selection for spiders who stay out of my house.

@Paul4747 Somehow I'm not sure if it works that way . I let them be or maybe put them outside. Same with wasps ,flies etc. Can't understand why people kill wasps, particularly gardeners considering the good they do.

@Moravian If they come into the house, I let them alone. I live in a mosquito heavy area and they provide some food for the spiders. So, they work for me and I let them stay. Better than my lazy cats.

@Moravian A doctor told me Wasps are worthless. They are pollen distributing insects just like bees.
They all work for us in a way. Unless a stinging insect is in the house. I can't take a chance of being stung.

@PondartIncbendog wasps eat aphids and other small insects which are harmfull to plants. They rarely sting unless their nest is disturbed. Live and let live I say.

I don't adhere to percentages when it comes to my beliefs as an agnostic but the more evil I see being done by people who profess to be christians the closer I get to atheism. I think if I may speak for us as a group you really can't slap a percentage on things other than we 100% believe that you can never really know anything with 100% certainty and even that could be questionable...

@Slartibartfast I agree, but I do find in myself stronger and weaker beliefs (and doubts) and I used percentage-language as a convenience. Hope it was not too misleading. And even if percentages could be accurate I suppose the needle that gauges my beliefs would quivver from moment to moment and probably take pretty wild swings according to my current moods, thoughts, experiences, etc.

In heaven one is a slave, in hell one is at least free.

@DavidLaDeau and the fun sins

That oughta do it.

There is a Hikarious series on Netflix called "Lucifer"... he has daddy issues!