So, who's afraid of hell?

Agree 100%. 20 characters.

Agree 100%. 20 character.

This is very important, and we should also bear in mind that the vast majority of abortions involve a tiny clump of insentient cells, and those organisations would also ban the morning after pill, for some perspective.

I wish no abortions were ever needed, and am lucky in that as a man I never will need one, but have no right, nor do I believe has anyone else, to dictate to others how their bodies should be used.

A useful analogy is an 18 year old in kidney failure, after searching for a donor the father is the best and only match. The father refuses to donate a kidney, certainly meaning his 18 year old son would die. Would anyone dare suggest we ignore that man’s wishes, and use his body to harvest that organ against the father’s will?

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When I moved away from religion, I was never afraid of anything related to it ever again. Cause I have nothing to fear anymore when it comes to “sins” or “blasphemy”. I know now that there isn’t a devil that’s gonna punish me for my wrongdoings, so I stopped worrying about it since then.

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NOT afraid of Hell. I’ve been married four times.

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I was never afraid of hell to begin with.

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I used to be afraid of burning is hell, but then I thought that if God is everything in existence and Hell exists, then a part of God, made from his essence (or whatever religious concept), is burning in Hell. Is it not?
Such a weird for a God thing to do. This is what happens to people who believe existence is suffering (christianity, islam, Buddhism), rather than existence being simply a fact and to make the most of it.

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Luckily there is no evidence that Hell exists, so I am as afraid of the machinations of an imaginary posthumous torture chamber, as I am of being dragged to a watery grave, by a nefarious mermaid, and for the same reason.

Aso you say, why not deal with the objective fact of reality, rather than waste time fearing things there is no objective evidence for, like the idea we can survive our own physical deaths in any meaningful way.

Being an agnostic negates you thinking that, by definition?

“Thought” is past-tense, so I no longer believe in God. I’m agnostic because i believe atheism can blind people to other variants of religion such as Gnosticism (as seen in Communists, Nazis, Wokeness), without realizing they are religious concepts.
I consider myself a gnostic annihilationist, where I reject everyone elses concept of God, but remain skeptical of a God’s existence. I do not declare the absence of God, not because I am unsure of God’s existence, but because elements of God reside in various ideologies undetected (such as Communism which in an inversion of Christianity, where God is replaced by Communism, and Armageddon is replaced by perpetual revolution).
The certainty held by an atheist may blind them to other dangerous ideologies.

While you might have formally left Christianity; you seem to still be repeating Christian propaganda. I wonder how long it will take you to rid yourself of that.

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No. I was actually an atheist, and was only nominally Catholic through my parents. I reject atheism and all religion because it asserts certainty over something that is impossible to truly ascertain, which I believe leads to incoherent thinking. I also don’t believe it is possible to stop people from believing in God completely, for some people it is possible, but for others it is not, for various reasons, so another belief structure against religion and superstition is warranted.

You just confirmed you don’t know what an atheist is (or you do know and you are just strawmanning us).

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Re: atheism

No.

Twenty characters for claim rejection.

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Atheism asserts nothing, except disbelief in any deity or deities.

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Atheism isn’t a religion, it’s the rejection of the claim that a god/gods exist, and that they/it are responsible for the creation of the universe.

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BUT! If they didn’t have all those red herring to post they wouldn’t have anything to say. My own life was religion free except when I was forced to go to church. (Most notably during USN boot camp in 1969.)

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I Don’t Get how anyone can believe they will ‘Burn in Hell’. One has to look to Where Hell would be located. I’m not sure how you would have ‘burning Fires’ in a spiritual place. Next we look to who or what is to be in Hell. When you’ve reached Hell you’ve left your physical body behind. The physical body is what enabled you to feel pain. Without the physical body you cannot feel pain nor can you see touch or smell anything. What is the soul or consciousness comprised of? Is it a flammable material? I’m just not seeing burning in Hell or any way of inflicting pain once the body is dead. Does some believer have a clearer picture than I do?

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Take a child whose young brain is still in its early development stages (4, 5, 6 years old). That child has ZERO knowledge of physics, chemistry, or any other advanced sciences. Now, have the child’s mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles, close friends, etc. (people who the child sees as protectors who love and care about them), and have all those adults telling that child EVERY DAY how he/she will GO TO HELL WITH THE DEVIL if the child does not believe in the chosen god of the trusted adults. THAT is how a person grows up believing they will “burn in hell” if they do not believe in god, or if they do something to make god angry at them. It’s called “Brainwashing”. Basic Psychology 101.

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Or have a kid watch “The Exorcist,” “Late Night With Satan,” “Constantine,” and then send him or her to “Jesus Camp.” That will do the trick as well.

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Or get abducted by aliens, who have a space ship where the walls are sensitive to being looked at, and you’re watching the floor and little tiny men are marching from under the gated door way, where you’re in a cell and the walls are moving and they’re coming into place, and the little marching men reach the drain in the middle of the floor, when you realize that your on a mattress on the floor and you notice an industrial grade toilet in the far right corner, but you suddenly have a moment where your suspended in the middle of an unmoving understanding of the most powerful sentient being in the universe, and after that has passed you realize you’re locked in an alien spacecraft and you can’t figure out if the rest of the universe has been annihilated, but it sure feels like that, so you notice the sound of women laughing outside your cell as they walk through the corridor, which somehow makes the situation a little more “human” but then you make a mental intention to take a step off the mattress onto the tiled floor, and the industrial strength toilet in the far right corner turns out to be an omnipotent being and he psychically communicates to you that the only condition of your hostage is that if you touch the tile floor with your body a missile will come out of the toilet bowl and up your butt and send you into a little red light which is above your head on the south wall of the isolation cell, and it turns out that if you look at the red light long enough you can see that if the industrial toilet sends you there then your is eternally damned and you realize that Hell is a type of eternal destruction/containment of the mind, and there could be no harsher punishment than what exists (doesn’t exist) within the portal of that little red light, so you dare not take your foot off the mattress, but every now and then you have a slight thought about doing so and the toilet shifts imperceptibly to the left indicating that it has infinite power and will not hesitate to follow through with the conditions of the sentence, and you feel strangely comfortable with how unbelievably consequential this situation is, but you take a shallow breath in as if you were a new born baby and settle into a seated position on the mattress, where you notice a magazine, a banana, and a juice box have been set within arms reach on the tile, so, thinking that you’ll be there for eternity, you greedily eat the banana and the juice box and start to read through the magazine, only to find that the magazines of advanced alien super beings have text which seems to read itself for you and the text itself almost shifts as you read it as if perceptive of your eye sight and you can smell the advertisements and you find it all very interesting but you put the magazine down, only know realizing that if you are to spend the rest of eternity in this cell, guarded by the toilet, then taking a piss will be relatively easy, but taking a dump is going to be a whole other matter, and the irony that the industrial toilet super being is ideally where you’d go for a shit, but the consequence of stepping foot on the tile is eternal damnation, so you decide that you might as well take a rest, and you lay back on the mattress and quickly fall off to sleep, and when you wake up you find your self back in the reality from which you were stolen, inside a hospital isolation room ironically enough, and you sink back into the pernicious delusion that the best case scenario, since you’ll be spending eternity unable to move when you’re dead, is to not move a single inch while life lasts, thereby bringing death upon your self relatively easily while minimizing all possible movement, since any and all deviations from a completely motionless state entail a slightly worse eternity in the afterlife where you’ll be a conscious corpse, and after a few days your mother begs you to move and eat something and you give up on your mission and finally make a voluntary effort to move and you do in fact move off the mattress in the real world fearing that somehow you’ve violated the conditions of the alien spaceship, and this worry haunts you for a long time and the impression made by the eternal damnation of that red portal to Hell never leaves your mind and your convinced for the rest of your life that when you do in fact die, you will be brought back to the spaceship and the cell with the omnipotent toilet, but at least as you get older you accept that the toilet might change the arrangement of the conditions as you begin to improve as a person while in isolation, so you endeavour for the rest of your life to avoid that situation altogether never once knowing for sure if that all powerful being will simply cast you into damnation, given that the minor act of setting a single foot on the tile floor meant, without doubt or equivocation, that you would be sent, soul body and mind, into the eternal cell of infinite suffering (and I do mean infinite suffering - no further suffering could be proposed beyond the nature of that place), so you attempt to go on with your life not mentioning the existence of Hell to anyone because they would never really understand why people over the years have talked about it.

That … can lead one to fear Hell.

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