"No matter how black the devil, you must look him in the face." -Vincent Van Gogh

Read "God and the State" by Mikhail Bakunin my namesake. Specifically when he explains the role of Satan as the great Emancipator of mankind from a jealous, petty and vengeful god in heaven.

My theory: - Sounds a bit like my addiction to sugary foods, acknowledge the thought has come up and try and dismiss it; it will do you no good in the long run. It’s not really food/ food for thought, but something that our mind is attracted too.
There’s nothing to be gained from it
New information and healthier ideas will become more prevalent over time and hopefully the urge to think about unhealthy things will desist. But it is played on in society, so the concepts will stay in some ways.

You acknowledge the very root of it: fear. Myths are 'planted' in our little wooly heads as soon as possible like little seeds sown with a fertilizer called fear of punishment and security from approval and the reward of 'inclusion' with family and community.

It requires repossessing what we were deprived of and literally forced to suppress in order to accept the mythical systems of thought necessary for security from bad outcomes. Strangely, I still think of it as 'faith', but faith in ourselves and our own instinctual capacities for evaluating reality. We're born (in my faith...) with at least two self-regulating instincts that are sidelined as a price of membership in society in exchange for externally dictated replacements. They are morality and sexuality. We're first, as children, deprived of development of them and as we gain 'full membership' become conditioned to voluntarily abdicate them for substitutes that make us all sick by different degrees; depending on our native abilities to internalize the artifice and still function legally and honestly within society as dictated.

Tips:

Know that your own 'gut' and reasoning, though imperfect, is more reliable and more your friend than what the 'reasoning of others' has to offer. We get for free (so to say) what others persuade us to accept with promises that THEY know better and that our interests are important to them.

Might doesn't make 'right' and neither does consensus, when it is a product of off the shelf or menu concoction. We must write our own recipes. When we do, we know why each and every ingredient is included and others excluded internally. Those consuming packaged, manufactured goods know only some ingredients and depend upon 'makers' for talking points, scriptures, etc. to explain what they THINK they believe.

Truth really does set one free, but the catch is that we have to cooperate in emancipating ourselves by pursuing Truth with our own curiosity and reasoning; free of the parasites all around us, hawking this or that 'ism' which are for the most part only a protection racket in disguise. Truth is the daughter of Time, it is said. We find it in time on our own paths. The less we're detoured by isms the less time necessary to reach our destinations.

Don't allow people with native faculties no better than yours to infect you with their self-deluded notions that they 'know better than you' because they've discovered a wonderful magic-like secret that explains more than you are equipped to understand on your own. They've been conned and want to hook others to feed their suppliers and their own addictions.

I'd say 'good luck' but luck is always good. That is, if we only recognize it.

Read the Inferno part of Dante’s Divine Comedy then you’ll see you have to be pretty fucked to get there. Most of the bad guys end up in purgatory which isn’t too bad.

It’s also medieval Christianity which trumps any of the mamby pamby evangelical crap like like the Rapture.

It’s really serious and heavy stuff for the believer of the time.

Look at hell as part of a Monty Python sketch to see its absurdity.

Use reasoning with heavy applications of reality vrs beliefs....
Then look at the underpinnings of the beliefs. Every word written about them was for the control of groups of people. Then add in the thousands of so called editions highly edited for specific control situations.
I suggest get a real clear picture of how it is used.