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Fear of hell
I think the fear of hell was what really made me start taking religion seriously in the first place. Eighth grade was when it started to click for me, so I started going to church a lot more and reading the Bible. Then in high school I also developed a conviction that the survival of Christianity was vital to the preservation of Western culture.
I stopped going to church in my freshman year of college. I was going out with a girl (still my girlfriend today) but I felt uncomfortable about dating her because she was a non-Christian. I think I can remember her asking me wonderingly why I was a Christian and not being able to give a very good answer, which bothered me. I can remember, at that time, sort of wishing that I wasn't a Christian, so that our belief systems would mesh together more neatly. Then I tried to look at the beliefs I had affirmed for years from the outside, to see how strong or weak they looked when I stepped beyond the assumptions that guided my religious views. I guess I was trying to deconstruct my faith, extirpate it from my mind. And I can remember a specific day, sitting on a bench in the sun and thinking about this, and feeling something inside myself sort of like what you might feel after a breakup, or when someone you really like rejects you. Maybe that was the point when I "lost faith." At night I would half-dream about being sent to hell for not believing, and in some of these twisted visions my girlfriend or parents would be there, too, being tortured alongside me. Eventually these thoughts stopped, but occasionally they still resurface. Fear excited over and over again can stay burned into your head even after you've concluded that it's irrational.
Sometimes I find myself frightened by the possibility that maybe I'm really wrong not to believe in God and that when I die I'll be sent to hell and suffer eternally for being a non-believer. Maybe in spite of having thought pretty carefully about religion, I reached the wrong conclusions. Yeah, a lot of the ideas in religions don't make any sense to me, and the evidence in their favor really seems spare to non-existent, and it seems like most of the world's smartest people don't put much stock in the fire and brimstone stuff (even if some pretty smart ones are religious in other senses), but it seems like my ideas about what "makes sense" or what constitutes "good evidence" could be off-kilter in some way, and I could end up believing the wrong things because of that.
And then I wonder whether I could ever genuinely worship a god who chose to deal out eternal pain to those who didn't believe in him, even if I were convinced there was good evidence for his existence. I'm leaning toward "no."
I have been up all night.
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