How I Got Over My Fear of Hell (as a Lapsed Catholic)

I'm not an atheist but it's interesting to hear your educated opinions about things regarding Religion, God, or indirectly related to these.

20july1944 can’t make an argument for god to save his life.

What really help me get over it was realizing how the depiction of hell in the illustrations are caricatures of fear and evil, they are clearly human creations

Define Good. The Christian God is a narcissist who thinks he is good but is actually evil.

Alex will not go hell because he is good for heaven according to his standard 😂

I don't believe in heaven, hell and any god.

I know that you talk hypothetically about perfectly fair god based on logic of believers. But you know what...basing anything on logic of religious people is like giving a steering wheel to a three y old. He will gladly grab it, but soon you will find yourself in a ditch.
Their perfectly fair god is perfectly loving...but millions of good people and children get terrible diseases, suffer immensely and die. So many people gets brutally attacked by bstards..loving, protective god is nowhere to help them.
Their perfectly fair and loving god created a world of surviving and suffering..
So, if you base logic on logic of religious people, Be afraid of hell..because such a chaotic, bipolar god could easily throw you to the hell.."You sneezed and didn't use a tissue?! Monster! Hell forever for you!"
"The other guy killed 3 neighbours and stole their money? He goes to heaven! Of course! Why? Because he said; Forgive me God!"

Catholics don't believe that all non believers go to hell, unlike Evangelicals. They also believe in Purgatory, a doctrine which has its roots in the prior Christian belief in reincarnation (which was removed from the canon by the Roman emperor Justinisn).

Even as a Christian, I didn’t believe in hell. It never made sense to me that a loving God would punish you for ALL of eternity. Just nonsensical. Now I don’t believe in any of it so 🤷🏼‍♀️

We are already in hell because Christians are around us.

So you believe that the Christian God is a perfectly just God? A supernatural bean that creates other beans knowing their past present and future knowing whether or not they’re going to choose this being and baseball that choice he’s gonna send them to heaven or hell is a just being? This being is literally creating beans where they know their future and making them not choose him. How can this Christian God be just? There’s nothing just about creating beans to go to heaven or hell and then saying oh it was your choice.

If you believe there is hell then surely you believe God exists, you just don’t want to accept Him. All you have to do to get to hell is be yourself, the bible says all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, which means you cannot save yourself, it is only through accepting Christ as your personal saviour that you will go heaven.

can you feel the same joy from e.g playing music without the belief of a god? in the church arena they preach that any expression 'of the heart' is an expression for (G)od so it leaves amyone bought up with a familial belief a little bereft even if this is not mandatory!

I would listen to you just because of how you talk and think. So far, you have been a huge influence.

Hell is the absence of god. Which you can choose to do

I actually remember the exact moment my parents told me about god and hell and I literally thought they were messing with me, which disproves the belief that people innately believe in god, I didn’t know about it till I was 5 or 6 and I didn’t care about it either

I have a question, Alex. Let's say if your right that hell is not real then you will die and seize to exist, but if it real , can you really risk that in a concept that you think that a justify Christian God will not punish you because you are just, like an average human being. Cause according to the Bible, it says that it's through Christ that you can enter "heaven" + your good morals, not just good morals by itself. Please explain

Man i just played doom eternal

How can that god possibly be perfect and loving when if created so much suffering

I can’t wrap my head around an all loving knowing prefect god creating a person that is even capable of doing the bad things and not believing in him to deserve to go to hell. Like why even make that a thing?

love it, when a little rich boy, talks about free will

Raised by a atheistic family, I feel lucky to have not experienced the fear that you have.

As a naturalism atheist, I find it absurd for an atheist to even care about afterlife.

Respectfully Alex O'Connor is an attractive man.

My idea of hell was similar to this, but for some reason I eventually thought it was God himself, not Satan, that did the torturing.

With whatever worth a phrase like ‘all due respect’ carries - If God himself tortures me even if I deserve it, then I want nothing to do with him. Why then would he not be then sinning against me, and/or himself by breaking his own law or commitment to love me? Why would the torturing not be wrong?

All these conversations about justice and a just God hinge on this notion of you get what you deserve or reap what you sow or an eye for an eye.

But then we’re told God is merciful and slow to anger and forgives, so if he does so then why would He be the torturer in any instance for any amount of time?

I like to think now that hell is here right now on earth and that we’re moreso punished ‘by our sins’, not FOR our sins (by another person or God). I have always wondered why we don’t consider the act of punishment (be it here or forever in hell) from the other person administering the punishment, not an immoral act in itself, even if it’s carried out on a ‘deserving’ party.

If you separate/unlink the connection of ‘we’re killing or torturing this person because they deserve it’ and all you saw was the torturing or killing of the person who deserves it, then why is that act not sinful? Or wrong? Or whatever word? At best, punishment is trying to use forceful means to settle a score or level out a scale, but it never considers the damage and harm that itself does to others. It’s essentially just retribution/punitive, with no intention for correction and no care for what lead to the punishable action. It doesn’t sniff anywhere close to being ‘forgiving.’

Disclaimer: Sorry if this sounds rude, I have a tendency to sound a little rude when debating:

You cant decide exactly what justice is or what seems just since you didn't create the idea of justice. God, the creator of everything, told us what He would do if we didn't simply believe that Jesus died for our sins (which isn't hard to do at all, so I don't know why people have trouble doing it), and to think that we know better than God is foolish; if we are supposed to do something instructed to us by God but don't understand why, then we have to have faith that the perfect God who created us all knows what He is doing and that in the end, everything works out. This might sound dumb in a sense because it sounds like we are mindlessly following God but there is evidence to prove that He won't fail us (like how He has kept every promise He has made).
I believe in the Hell where we are completely separated from God, which of course would bring about chaos, and it should strike fear in you because if God, the creator of justice, is telling you what will happen if you don't believe Jesus Christ died for your sins, and you say "Surely that won't happen based on my idea of justice", and you reject Christ, then things don't seem like they are going to end well.

I hope ur abortion views are much more cemented now

Repent

Alex has brought me so much closer to Jesus ❤

my problem with the definition of atheism being "belief that god does not exist", is the assumption some theist make, that I should be willing to die for this belief. Me being an atheist means I do not think god exists. But if it were to save my life or the life of my loved ones, I'd certainly lie about it. I could live my whole life pretending to be a theist, and not being true to my real "belief". It's not a "belief" in the sense that I would put everything else over it. Similarly, I would tell everyone in my life that I believe in a flat earth if it would save my life.

I got over my fear of Hell by researching that the concept of postmortem punishment evolved over time, and that the Hell I was taught of in a Protestant church is mainly derived from Dante’s Inferno, not the Bible.

Christian belief is a habit, it's not as genuine as one might think it be unless it is a Christian who seeks answers to questions continually even if those answers aren't the ones he prefers.

Unfortunately or fortunately I now know these things to be true. Hell and heaven do exist.

idea of God being "perfectly just and loving" doesn't calm me down, because it sounds absurd - of course existence of God itself is also absurd, but from the perspective of this 0.001% anxiety that allows possibility of his existence, if he's real then he's not "just and loving" at all, he made this planet with billion years of suffering, giving some of creatures relatively good experience, while others lived only to suffer and fear almost all the time - that's neither good nor just. So I would assume that he's evil and sadistic, but I gotta check out your arguments on why you expect him to be just, maybe that's the key to get rid of this unreasonable paranoia.

I've sometimes heard the phrase "a wise man fears God" and I never understood why someone should fear something that is supposedly all loving. Contradictory.

I got over my fear of hell the same way skydivers get over their fear of falling to their death....just stop believing in the ground. Why would the ground want to kill me?

you look like billy joe armstrong when you're playing music!

That’s how I feel, if you don’t believe in god then you don’t believe in hell or heaven, and I was told that as a woman they would torture and grape me bc that would be my torment. Or others getting graped in hell, I don’t deserve to be in hell, and I don’t deserve grape either. I have been saved since I was 10, but I don’t think people deserve torture and grape as a punishment.

When you said “four theses” I thought you said “four faeces” 💀

The reason i stopped being afraid of Hell (or any retribution from god) is I grew up and realized it was complete nonsense and childish in simplicity. To quote from the bible itself "when i was a child i spoke as a child. Now that i am a man i put a away childish things."

What if the Sun is the "eternal fire" and the vast emptiness of space is the "outer darkness" referenced in the Bible, and we're all just living our lives day by day waiting until everyone repents and joins God in Heaven?

Lol jk. Fun to think about tho.

Sheer rationality helped me get over my fear of Hell. My fear of Hell was based on the idea that if there was a place of infinite suffering or even absolutely immense suffering for a none infinite amount of time surely that is the most important thing to actively try to avoid and therefore you should likely dedicate your entire life to it. It's simply a mathematical equation of maximally reduction of suffering and in the inverse, for Heaven, maximally increasing fulfillment. This logic still holds true to me and that undeniability gripped me with fear for a little while. However I quite quickly came to the realisation that I have no idea how to achieve that and any path I take may or may not improve my chances equally. We tend to believe "Be a good person" or "Believe in Christ" but there's no logical reason for any of that compared to even the exact opposite of those things. I still agree with the idea of maximal reduction of suffering and maximal increase in fulfillment but now I base it entirely in what's rationally plausible not hypothetical concepts. After all perhaps being a morally abysmal atheist will send you to a place resembling Heaven and the opposite true for Hell. We simply can't tell so there's no reason to fear one idea over another. Unreasonable anxiety is usually solved, in my experience, through rationality. Annoyingly if I decide that there is a more likely way to achieve Heaven and avoid Hell I must embark fully on the journey. I guess in that regard so be it. As of now I've not rationalised such a lifestyle.

bro, you should be a proffessor, i never thought about it like this. Thank you so much.
This idea of hell is like telling a child to pray to Jesus if you don't want to suffer in eternal hell for stealing a pencil

I grew up as a german pastor's son and I have a strong faith, strangely enough, hell was never really part of it. My father managed to teach me Christianity and its morals without having to scare me with hell. The first time I really got in touch with the concept of hell was when I encountered American christian content in the Internet

I used to fear of going to hell when I was young but as I'm getting older and life's getting tougher, my attitude towards hell was " if I go to hell then f*ck it cause I was born in the country closer to hell "Haiti" I've seen some real sh*t, done spent couple days without eating. What can possibly be worse than the life we live. But for some reason I do believe in God. Just not the Christian one

Perfectly "just" according to whose standard though? There's a huge assumption that divine "just"and your "just" would perfectly align.

I'm going to wait to watch this video when I'm sure your not contagious

You appear desperate for evidence of God so you can accept him into your life . I wouldn’t describe you as Atheist, mostly Agnostic.