In my religious background, there is huge emphasis on fearing God, fearing His wrath, and hell. Hell is very graphical. Here are some verses showing how graphical it is:
“And if ye do it not - and ye can never do it - then guard yourselves against the Fire prepared for disbelievers, whose fuel is of men and stones.” (Q 2:24) “Lo! Those who disbelieve Our revelations, We shall expose them to the Fire. As often as their skins are consumed We shall exchange them for fresh skins that they may taste the torment. Lo! Allah is ever Mighty, Wise.” (Q 4:56) “For such, their habitation will be hell, and they will find no refuge therefrom” (Q 4:121) “Lo! the hypocrites (will be) in the lowest deep of the Fire, and thou wilt find no helper for them;” (Q 4:145) “Lo! those who disbelieve and deal in wrong, Allah will never forgive them, neither will He guide them unto a road, Except the road of hell, wherein they will abide for ever. And that is ever easy for Allah.” (Q 4:168-169) “They will wish to come forth from the Fire, but they will not come forth from it. Theirs will be a lasting doom.” (Q 5:37) “Theirs will be a bed of hell, and over them coverings (of hell). Thus do We requite wrong-doers.” (Q 7:41) “O ye who believe! Lo! many of the (Jewish) rabbis and the (Christian) monks devour the wealth of mankind wantonly and debar (men) from the way of Allah. They who hoard up gold and silver and spend it not in the way of Allah, unto them give tidings (O Muhammad) of a painful doom, On the day when it will (all) be heated in the fire of hell, and their foreheads and their flanks and their backs will be branded therewith (and it will be said unto them): Here is that which ye hoarded for yourselves. Now taste of what ye used to hoard.” (Q 9:35) “Know they not that whoso opposeth Allah and His messenger, his verily is fire of hell, to abide therein ? That is the extreme abasement.” (Q 9:63) “Hell is before him, and he is made to drink a festering water, Which he sippeth but can hardly swallow, and death cometh unto him from every side while yet he cannot die, and before him is a harsh doom.” (Q 14:16-17)
Even though I have left this religion but I get this nightmare that I am getting punishment for leaving the religion. I feel scared that what if I am wrong and end up burning in hellfire.
How to get rid of this fear so that I can live my life freely?
I tend to take a credo quia absurdum approach to a lot of these arguments. If there are omniscient/omnipotent beings they would have to be, by definition, beyond our ability to understand. So it’s ridiculous to think that despite that some group of people would figure out exactly the right rules by which these things would want us to behave.
Be a good person. Help others. Pay it forward. And regardless of whether there are gods or not, you will have done your small part to make the world a bit better.
Oh, but almost every religion solves this guessing problem with the elegance of an elephant: those behaviour rules were told by the god itself at some point. So it is completely precise.
Therapy! You’ve likely been traumatized. You need to deal with the trauma. Logic helps the mind, but you need the heart to heal.
*personal experience, religion traumatized me and it took years after becoming an atheist to get over my fear of hell. If I had to do it again I’d definitely do it with a therapist.
I cannot access a therapist.
That is unfortunate. Perhaps a local social group around the topic at a community center or something?
Even if here on Lemmy is your only outlet, having these conversations is awesome and a great step on your journey of self-discovery and recovery.
Talking it out with others really helps, but sometimes it takes a smaller group or a conversation with a single person to feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable in your chats.
EDIT: Read some of your other posts in the thread about fear of harm if your religiousness is in doubt, which can certainly making finding likeminded individuals difficult. “Move somewhere else” is an easy thing for a random internet voice to say, but if you’re in that level of danger, it sounds like you need to leave as soon as you can. You’re in an abusive religious relationship. Get out.
I have nothing but my internet.
If you truly believe that hell exists and you fear punishment in the afterlife, then you are still fundamentally religious at heart.
I don’t choose not to believe in hell, nor do I choose not to believe in the words of the Bible, Torah, Quran, or other dogma from other religions. I simply never believed them in the first place. I don’t fear being wrong and being punished in the afterlife, because I don’t believe in heaven, hell, gods or devils. (And even if I did believe in a god, I would never believe in one that is so petty that they would smite me for having doubts or other beliefs.)
In my view, fear is used by religious authorities to control people, so that they will submit without question to arbitrary rules and limitations that they would not otherwise follow. Fear and reward are great motivators.
I don’t think you can truly be free until you have broken free from the shackles of fear that were designed to keep you in line with the teachings of your former religion. You are still being controlled by that fear today because you still aren’t sure whether you believe or not.
I have doubts, not firm belief in the hell.
I wasn’t quite brought up to the same extent, but fear of hell was a big one for us too. It still bothers me occasionally, if I’m honest, and probably always will. A thorn in the mind that was embedded as a child that I’m still trying to dislodge. (And another reason I never wanted my kids to be raised in the church.)
Here’s the thing that comforts and challenges me, beyond the Marcus Aurelius quote that had already been posted— How do you know it’s the Christian God waiting for you? What if it’s Odin? Anubis? Zeus? Allah? What if you end up in Valhalla? Why do you fear being bad for Jesus and not Santa Claus? Just be a good person. I’d rather be evaluated for my own successes and failures than get in just because I’m friends with the homeowner’s kid.
Finally, if you have the opportunity and ability to, I would also highly recommend watching The Good Place.
Look man, I’ve already been dead once and have nothing to report so maybe that helps.
So how are you alive again?
Luck that my family noticed and directly kept my blood pumping until the ER resuscitated me.
I’ve largely dealt with the same as you are dealing with right now. It used to drive me crazy and I’d wake up from nightmares bathing in sweat.
There’s no “if this then that” formula to fix it right away. There’s also nothing wrong with you. The human psyche has many layers and it’s gonna take time and therapy to get it out of them.
What worked for me is:
-join groups (online or irl) that deal with post religious trauma syndrome. You are absolutely not alone.
-confront the sources of what your fears are built on by looking up historical context (religion for breakfast on youtube is a very powerful tool for that).
-go easy on yourself. This gonna take some time. Don’t despair if you feel like it’s never gonna go away. It will, gradually.
Keep in mind that you’ve probably had to live with a god looking over your shoulder who demanded perfection. That takes a huge toll on your system.
You’re on the road to recovery. Best of luck and again, don’t despair, it’s ok to slip up.
Edit: it also helps to look back sometimes. Think of what things you used to believe vs how you look at them now. It’s easy to lose sight of the progress you have made in comparison to how loud these feelings can get.
I’d suggest finding a therapist who can help you.
Dude, I am going to level with you. You probably have OCD. This is a common struggle for people who have religious compulsions but have left their religion. It’s one of the nastier scars that a religious background can leave behind.
You. Are not. Crazy. You’re not crazy, you’re not a bad person, and above all, you are NOT going to hell.
Every therapist here is part time exorcist.
Look at this this way: burning in hell might be uncomfortable for a little while, but after a year or so it would probably start to get boring. After a thousand years you could presume that you might actually enjoy it. After a million years of being burned you wouldnt even notice it and would probably miss it.
In my religion, it is that the pain will only increase. Hadith literature regarding hell is more graphic than I showed here.
major spoiler for The Good Place
This is one of the things in The Good Place, but from a perspective of heaven. If you could do everything you ever dreamed of without a care of ever dying or being hurt, how long would it take you to be bored? You really going to be entertained watching your favorite movie for literally the ten billionth time?
And after having a pitch fork poked in your ass for the billionth time you just be like whatever bro
That’s what religious people don’t understand: pleasure and pain are temporal concepts. Anything done to you long enough just becomes common reality . You can’t be “tortured “ for eternity because after a long enough time, it’s no longer torture just reality
Yup, that’s the idea.
How did you get rid of your fear of the Greek Tartarus or the Norse Hel or etc… Same way.
I did not know them while growing up but this one had been hammered since I was born. I have left religion in 2025 so I think I am getting adjusted with this new way of life.
Then you have to ask yourself what you are really afraid of? You’re obviously not afraid of the concept. Otherwise you’d be just as scared of Naraka as Hell. You’re afraid of the psychological conditioning, or brainwashing. Which is a logical thing that can be understood.
Now I’m not qualified to suggest anything about overcoming psychological conditioning, however you know that the issue is that conditioning and not the fairy tale nonsense. No idea if that helps but hopefully it takes most of the fear out of the equation.
Hopefully this is a take that’s different from the ones other people offered you; I was Agnostically Abrahamic-adjacent into my mid twenties and still grappled with the possibility that I was going to inevitably be tortured at the end of my life by something. Psychological residue of religious abuse.
But here is kind of where I’m at now: we can’t know if there will or won’t be torture. If you can’t help but feel like it’s coming then just live a life that’s worthy of you now. This is all the info we have to work with and being good to eachother probably matters more than whatever consequence awaits us. I think I’d still feel that way in the worst possible outcome. After a while separated from any churches, the fear of being punished slowly subsides and you can just live your life.
I hope you reach that point in your journey soon. Reach out if you ever need to talk about it.
I hope that I can get freedom to live how I want. I fear that I may never gain that and if I could not, I may be unable to forgive myself.
That’s definitely a worse fate and a more tangible fear than spiritual torture, in my opinion. If you’ll do me a favor and possibly any others who are struggling the same way: post any moments of joy you find in your life when they come. We need to share our experiences of overcoming religious shame. It helps model success for one another and gives us opportunities to raise eachother up.
Today was kinda joyful as the weather was very lovely, I went to library today and read books in hard copy after a long time. I also came to vibe with a song that I was listening with a friend while travelling to university. Last night, I had the joy to listen to an informative podcast and that gave me a lot of information.
Hell isn’t real, neither is heaven. I died for a little bit and came back, if they hadn’t told me my heart stopped, I never would have known.
Me too, and same. No heaven, no hell, nothing.
And I went down the rabbit hole of NDE research for a while – it’s really interesting that for people who have NDE visions, they always match the person’s religion/culture. Like, non-Abrahamic believers who report NDEs don’t tend to have the classic Western heaven/hell experience. If it was real, wouldn’t everyone have the same experiences, rather than whatever matches their religious or cultural expectations? It’s not real.
I think education and cogitative behavioral therapy techniques can be put to good use to retrain either inherited or indoctrinated intuitions & religious trauma
A couple of things that might help, although this fear is probably deeply ingrained:
“Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not? Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear. Religious tyranny did domineer. At length the mighty one of Greece Began to assent the liberty of man.”
- Epicurus
If there’s a God and they created such suffering, they would not be a God.
“God," says Epicurus, "either wants to remove evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not want to; or he does not want to and cannot; or he wants to and can. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent; which is inadmissible in God. If he can, but does not want to, he is envious; which is also alien to God. If he does not want to and cannot, then he is envious and impotent; and this too cannot be attributed to God. If he wants to and can, which alone is proper to God, then where do evils come from? Or why does he not remove them? — Lactantius, On the Wrath of God
first of all, im sorry for the nightmares. it is insanely hard to get rid of dreams like those. unfourtunately im not a professional, but you need to go through a few questions.
- why did you leave this behind? was it the rules or the community?
- how much does the main ruleset change your daily life? are you having sex with your best friends’ wife? are you killing people? ofc you dont. this is an old rulebook, and this was a solution to keep everyone in the line. not gonna lie, it was a smart move.
- imagine sitting in the fire. all of your skin burns off. then some guy comes over, apologises, and gives you a new skin just to burn those off as well. do you find this realistic?
If a god exists, we have no way of knowing anything about them. Religion is something humans made up to guess at the nature of a god, but it’s nothing more than guessing. There is no reason to think any of these guesses would be anywhere close to true, let alone which guess would be the correct one.
Many major religions all preach that if you don’t believe this specific religion, you will be doomed to hell for all eternity. But since religion is nothing more than a guess, they’re really saying that you will be damned for guessing wrong. Even if we accepted that one of these might be true, we still aren’t any closer to knowing which one, which guess won’t send you to hell.
These religions also speak of a just and loving god. But if god was truly just and loving, would he really torture you forever just for guessing wrong? Does that make sense?
All you can really do is try to live a good life and strive to always do the right thing. If a god does exist, if that god is truly just and loving, then surely the life you lived should be far more important than the guess you made.
I want to escape from gods. These thoughts about gods, Jesus, spirituality feels like a prison to me and I want to be free. I cannot escape from the gods on the earth but I don’t know if I can escape the gods in heavens or not.
The naive idea of Hell (no pun intended) is on its face absurd. We know that cognition and sensation come from physical processes (the brain, body and nervous system) from observing how these things fail and what happens. As such, the idea of an eternal fire that burns you without the escape of death is impossible: even if the nerves that sense the agony of their own destruction were magically regenerated, the nervous system would shut down.
Theologians dealing with people who saw through this acknowledged it and reframed Hell as something more philosophical: the absence of the presence of God and such, with the assumption that knowing that the big man in the sky loves you is the one thing that makes life worth living. This assumption has also been refuted: Existentialist philosophy, for example, makes short shrift of it: yes, there is no God, no grand narrative, and no ultimate universal meaning to our lives, so why bother living? Because we make our own meaning as we interact with others and engage with the world. No existentialist would fear this Hell if it existed, because they’d be making their own fun in the cold, unhallowed darkness.
Also, if Satan is the bad guy, why is he working as the good guy’s jailer and torturing those who were insufficiently respectful to him? That part makes no sense.
I personally love Satan. If you read the conversation between God and Satan in the scripture that I quoted, you will feel that it is a hero. Regarding hell, some scholars in my previous religion like Ibn e Arabi and Ibn e Taymiyah have said though that hell will end at some point and all the dwellers in hell too will be annihilated (it was and is very fringe opinion though)
