After I concluded that gods are a man made myth with such a minuscule probability of any of them existing as to not waste my time I was never bothered with the concern that I, or anyone I cared about, was going to be tortured in hell for eternity. That said it does seem a hard point to over come with some people. Even Alex O’Connor (a well known atheist) has said it was hard to let go of. Humor, what amounts to blasphemy to some believers, does seem one way to combat the fear religion instills. No wonder some of the religious like the idea of punishment for any “blasphemy” of their beliefs.
Was letting go of the fear of hell an issue for anyone here when leaving a religion? Have you ever tried to counter it in a wavering believer? As a child I do remember a nightmare about hell. They should be ashamed of themselves for teaching that to children. Pope Francis got both praise and ridicule when he reassured a little boy that he didn’t think that the boy’s dead unbeliever father was in hell. Of course, that’s little comfort to the many people with love ones who he absolutely thinks are being tortured for eternity.
I wasn’t raised with any of those myths so never needed to shuffle them off. But I think it’s easy for folks who were raised with negative reinforcement to hang on to that. I think people tend to do what they know.
Raising children with that sort of focus is horrid.
It’s also notable that different cultures developed their own, sometimes interesting variations on the “eternal concentration camp” concept. I gather the Viking vision of hell was a frozen wasteland, not a lava pit, for example. Then of course we have Dante’s Inferno, which is perhaps a typical example of the rococo in Italian literature. More recently, George Orwell provided possibly the most inventive version thereof (though located firmly here on Earth) with his Room 101, which in many respects is far more fiendish than any of the ideas presented either in religious mythologies or the subsequent doctrines arising therefrom.
Another example of an inventive “living hell” is provided by one of the essays written by Bertrand Russell, in the form of The Existentialist’s Nightmare. That entire collection of essays is pretty spooky, and reads like a set of scripts for The Twylight Zone, demonstrating that Russell could write off the wall fiction with finesse. As a tangential diversion, Zahatopolk is possibly the weirdest part of that collection.
My situation as a kid was much the same.
And upon hearing another child speak of this “hell” for the first time at school, I recall thinking something like, “Wait, what? Have their parents seen this place? Who makes some shit like that up?”
Perhaps heaven was a little too one-note so another imaginary place where the drama happens had to be created.
Forgot to mention above, in part because the forum was throwing timeout wobblies while I was posting. Several here will enjoy this LEGO rendition of Dante’s Inferno. Someone had a truly fiendish mind when devising this little lot. 
EDIT: those interested in Bertrand Russell’s collection of essays, the title to search for is Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories. If you find a print copy at a car boot sale, snap it up. Be advised that it’s weird in places but then it deals with weird subject matter.
I’m not afraid of a make believe place.
The fear of Satan and hell was the ONLY thing that kept me tied to my Christian indoctrination for over forty years of my life. The bible and all the god/Jesus stories never made any sense to me as a little kid, and that confusion only got worse as I got older and learned more. Unfortunately, the threats of going to hell for doubting “The Word of God” got securely imbedded into my young psyche long before I ever had the means to counter/resist it. Fortunately, I have my wonderful wife to thank for helping me cut through all the sticky strings of my religious fears when she and I first met almost 13 years ago…
She grew up attending a private Christian school from kindergarten all the way through high school graduation. Bible study was a daily class that had to be passed every year to advance, and she was an “A” student in all of those yearly classes. As such, with her extensive knowledge of the bible, she was able to introduce me to stories I had never been taught during all my younger years in Sunday school. On top of that, she is an avid studier of the history/development of several other religions. (Oh, she is Pagan, by the way.) In a nut shell, she was able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together that helped me realize how the Christian dogma was pieced together from multiple other belief systems that had existed centuries prior to Christianity. And, little by little, the fear of Satan/hell gradually began to fade until I was eventually laughing at myself for ever having let it “torture” me for so many years. So, yeah, I can TOTALLY relate to and empathize with anybody out there who is struggling with the fear of hell. It’s not fun.
I fear hell as much as I fear being killed by a Minotaur, and for the same reason.
As a kid, I kept praying my evening prayers before going to bed, as I was taught. Around what would be high school in the US, I stopped, as I quite frankly was quite bored with it. Plus, I started thinking the whole concept was rather silly (why would an all-powerful and all-knowing god require me to pray for stuff to get my message?). At first, I was afraid of the immediate consequences of not praying, as Jebus or Dog would become disappointed in me or something. But nothing happened. Keeping up my non-praying schedule, nothing continued to happen. The fear of retributions slowly faded until gone. This was one of the very first steps I made towards abandoning religion.
But before this, I read the new testament, and was left with more questions than answers (like “Really?”, and “X in verse Y contradicts P in verse Q, what am I missing here?”, etc.) There and then I disregarded it, thinking I just wasn’t smart enough to understand it - “millions upon millions of people have read this, understood it, and believe in it, so it surely must be ME that just don’t get it! God, I’m dumb!”
I’m afraid of dying in the sense that I can’t truly comprehend not being here but no, not afraid of some dumb hell idea.
UK Atheist
I know I’ve only seen a small sample, but there does seem to be a pattern, people strongly indoctrinated with the concept of hell as children have a hard time getting past the idea. It’s an insidious tactic that seems to work all too well. It’s self perpetuating since indoctrinated people will be desperate to save their children from that fate.
In spite of being born into a catholic family, I’ve never believed in any of this stuff, so I’ve never had any fears of hell.
I am more scared of radiation sickness than Hell, and I really didn’t need to rewatch Chernobyl at this late hour, and after a drink…Jared Harris, and Stellan Skarsgård are outstanding in this I must say.
Hell, Hell, I laugh at Hell, radiation sickness on the other hand, not so much of the laughs. 
Among things I absolutely cannot watch on TV, be it documentaries or fiction, are depictions of medical operations, when they cut in people (or animals) in operating theatre sequences. Doesn’t matter if it’s real or realistic special effects, I can’t look at it. I have to look away. Been like that since I was a child. This is the second most important reason(*) I never even considered for a microsecond to pursue a career as a medical doctor.
Strangely, the thought of hell never really bothered or scared me much, even as a child. It seemed too abstract and too far fetched, so I more or less just dismissed it. Besides, how could anyone come up with these descriptions of hell, unless they had died, gone on a sightseeing trip in the place, and then come back to talk about the experience?
(*) The most important reason is that I’ve never found the medical sciences interesting enough to pursue them as a professional career. Besides, medical professionals have to work and interact with a lot of people. I prefer interacting with computers, as they behave in a more predictable manner 
When I was a very small child, I had a fear of hell . . . although it wasn’t instilled by my parents, as they were both disgusted with organized religion.
It came from my grandparents (and other relatives), and I had to work very hard at deconstructing it.
The thing that helped the most was seeing the nastiness done in the name of religion at the start of the AIDS epidemic. Christian preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were inciting violence, and this allowed me to question a lot of my indoctrination.
I decided that if God was just, than no sin (or series of sins) could justify eternal punishment, and if God was unjust, then it was stupid to fear Him anyway . . . as an omnipotent, unjust being could not be reasonably expected to be pacified.
Besides . . . the various versions of the Abrahamic faiths contradict each other. In Islam, a martyr who blows himself up as a suicide bomber in Jihad goes straight to paradise, while in Catholicism, a suicide goes straight to hell . . . yet they both acknowledge that they worship the same god.
These different versions of sin and virtue seem to cancel each other out in way similar to adding positive and negative numbers, so that we are left with using our own concepts of right and wrong to decide which religion to follow.
Since we must use our own sense of right and wrong to decide which religion is “correct,” then why not skip the religion part and use our sense of right and wrong without religion?
Thus, the concept of hell goes in the garbage can.
You can definitely fear something unfalsifiable, this includes hell.
I did once but I don’t now. I fell away from religion and becoming agnostic when I started reading science fiction but had nightmares about dying in space in a fire. When a friend rightly persuaded me I wasn’t actually an agnostic but an atheist I finally understood myself (with respect to religion) and the nightmares stopped. Perhaps the most interesting thing about that is that I no longer accept the distinction between atheism and agnosticism.
Yes, Catholicism still influences me, my views on abortion for example seem not quite as straight forward as most atheists (I’m still very pro women’s rights) but even at my advanced age it’s hard to shake thirteen years of both church and school “teachings”.
UK Atheist
I hear you on the abortion thing.
I am (very, very reluctantly) pro-choice, and I aggressively support women’s reproductive rights . . . yet I acknowledge some of the ideas behind the pro-life movement.
I was very pro-choice when I was younger, but my experiences in the medical field made me uncomfortable with some of the realities behind abortion.
I was a paramedic for almost 12 years in South Florida, and a woman who was 4 or 5 months pregnant was horribly injured in a truly nasy car wreck (she and her baby did not survive).
In any case, the fetus was mostly expelled by her body–due to the mechanics of the accident–and I saw it struggling and grasping with its hands for a few seconds before death.
I had (and still occasionally have) nightmares and flashbacks about that moment, and it made me see abortion in a different way. This incident also probably contributed to me having post-traumatic stress disorder.
So I’m still pro-choice, but it’s very difficult for me to rationally discuss abortion without thinking about it in the context of this accident. I realize that this isn’t entirely rational, but I argue that almost anyone on this forum would feel the same way if any of you had been a part of this incident.
That’s it exactly.
Never had any experiences like you have but I’ve read through some articles on how it’s done (it’s bloody awful what happens when they remove a living foetus from the womb) and I don’t see it being possible to define an exact point at which a foetus becomes human (a “person”) and not yet, like you, I still absolutely support a woman’s right to choose.
UK Atheist
Keep clearly in mind that the people and organizations most opposed to abortion are also the ones fighting tooth and nail against the things that would cause abortion rates to drop. They don’t even want education about birth control methods, let alone easy and affordable access to birth control. Later term abortions would also drop if abortions were easier to access in the first place. The people who only contribute to the problem shouldn’t be dictating to women. Restricting a woman’s right to choose has only bad consequences for women. One consequence women in the U.S. are dealing with is that women who miscarry (an estimated 10 to 20% of pregnancies) are finding it hard to get adequate care since the care for a miscarriage is is the same as care for post abortion.