/atheism/ - Atheism

>>162
When you actually believe you will go to hell for fucking up, you are willing to do anything to avoid it. Unless you value yourself as low as I did for a while. I used to pray that God would send me alone to hell so I could be damned for eternity in the place of everyone else. I figured that nobody deserved infinite torment no matter what they did, and I would take their place if God would allow it. Other than that time, as long as I believed in hell, I was 100% willing to throw myself into the way of life-threatening danger to protect literally any other people from harm because I worried that failing to do it would land me in a lake of fire literally for eternity. Same goes for killing gays (thank fuck I never met any open ones while I was religious), even though I have never felt any dislike or disgust for them as was common around me at the time. It wasn't something I really thought about that much at the time. It was more like a survival instinct.

>>162

Hell is actually scary if you've bought into it.

I had a big panic attack as teenager when I realized fapping was a mortal sin.

It's pretty funny in retrospect but I was real emotional distress.

>>253

Paganism?

It's even sillier than Christianity.

A Thundergod that rewards you for getting killed in a bar brawl is not an improvement over Jesus.

The Bible is outdated but so are the norse sagas.

The classic Dante's Inferno was the first depiction of hell to which I was introduced, so in early childhood, I thought that was what it was.

In my early teen years, when I had shifted away from Catholicism to nondenominational Christianity, I began to imagine Hell as a place more like Silent Hill: an entire dimension set aside in the afterlife just especially for the specific brand of eternal torture which would most terribly affect you as an individual. Specifically, one of the worst things I thought Hell would do to me was wake me up in my bed in my house. I would be relieved at the familiar surroundings and the conclusion of the terrible nightmare from which I had just awoken. I would get out of bed and roam the house, only to find that none of my family members were there. The eerie quiet and solitude would slowly erode my confidence and relief, and just as I began to piece together the reality that I did not actually wake up in the real world, sections of the house would change or go dark. Then the whole environment would change, reverting back to the hell which I had mistaken for a fleeting nightmare.

Once I was back in my own proper personal hell, it would not be a lake of fire or a place full of demons. It would simply be an empty environment. My hometown, my school, my father's shop; everything could be there, but it would all be completely uninhabited. The fear would set in that I would eventually starve and die in a world that had nobody else in it except for me. The loneliness was crushing. And I would not dare venture into the wilderness, because for some reason, I just knew that there were vicious otherworldly beasts stalking just outside the perimeter of what used to be civilization. I never ever encountered any signs of these things, but the fear kept me from venturing far or outdoors for very long.

Then I would actually wake up, and not trust that I had actually awoken from the nightmare of my own imagined hell.

Suffice to say, I'm glad to be done with those nightmares.

>>1431

Reason, logic and empiricism are the best parts of western culture. Atheism is an expression of your people too.

>>162


I don't ever remember having a fear of hell, because I never assumed I would go there. However, I had a fear of Satan. That kind of felt like being watched. As if Satan was watching and waiting every time I did something wrong, or thought I was doing something wrong. I even had a fear when I was younger that I would somehow be manipulated into selling my soul to Satan.

It's kind of funny now, because I've recently picked up The book of Satan, Satan Speaks!, The Book of Lies, and other occult-ish books. I guess Satan did take my soul in a way.


I don't know if that says something about me as a kid, thinking I could do no wrong as to not go to hell within the Christian religion. I guess it's a common thing for Christians they're personally too holy to go to hell.

>>1453
Sounds like someone did get taken by the devil.

>>1462

Hail Satan.

>>1428
I also used to have nightmares of hell when I was a Christian, all the way until my 20's. In some of them I'd be taken to the gates of heaven and then told that I had sinned too much and was going to hell. In 4th grade I had a dream that I was tied up in a fiery world and was going to be turned into a rubber ball and prodded with a stick. I was afraid of Satan and his minions, and would pray in my dreams at the first sign of trouble so that God would come and protect me, and I was always afraid I had sinned so much, or did not have enough faith, and so he would not come. I also had dreams where God was angry at me and shouting at me, and I'd be terrified that I was going to hell.

Guess what? Ever since I became an atheist I've been freed from having a single night-time terror story about God or hell. I can sleep easy now…

>>1428
A bit unrelated, but this dream description reminds me of the end of a really long creepypasta.

I always just figured God must love everyone, even the really bad people, so that if you were a bad person you might go to hell for a time to "work off" all the bad stuff you did, or if you were really evil you would stick around there and become a demon. Raised Catholic and I think the whole idea of purgatory led me to this conclusion. After all, if your relatives could be prayed out of purgatory, who's to say someone can't get out of hell?
When I was older I came to be of the opinion that a God who could be omniscient/omnipresent in an infinite universe (or very nearly infinite) is simply too huge of a being to be concerned with "punishment" of human beings for behaviors arbitrarily deemed wrong. Heaven or hell are simply states of being within the human condition.