Fear of hell, advice please

[drfuzzy]

Fundamentalist religions tend to be very fear and punishment based.  I was raised Pentecostal.  I heard dozens of preachers telling stories that -- even at a young age, I knew were complete fabrications.  One gave a talk about how rock music was an opening for demonic possession.  (This was in the late 60's, I'm dating myself.)  They played Beatles records backwards to let us "hear" the demonic voices that were deliberately added in the recording process.  Another preacher ranted against the very popular stuffed animal-toy "snakes" with jewel eyes - he said that many children had been demonically possessed because they played with a pretty fuzzy snake.  My Mother went right to my room, took my toy snake, and burned it.  (Smelled awful and I was really angry.)  Another preacher ranted and raved about evolution, and how stupid and evil it is, and how all scientists were demons in disguise, that demons had buried dinosaur bones to de-convert the faithful, and that Charles Darwin's grave is constantly infested with snakes.  And, of course, I could make a list of about 200 "sins" that would take people down the slippery slope to hell - guys with long hair, women who work, watching tv, reading about other religions, etc., etc.   They were just making up scary stories to keep the sheeple in line.  This seems to have been the prominent witch-doctor modus operandi for at least 2 billion years.

But if you have been raised with this nonsense, it's hard to pull away from it.  

Some of the thoughts that make me certain that hell is a myth are: 
1) it is completely immoral and it is extortion: "believe in my stories and my sacrifice and worship me (a deity for which there is absolutely no proof of its existence) or I'll burn you forever"
2) if this "god" who supposedly created the "heavens and the earth" is loving - at all - an afterlife would be instructive, not punitive, and most certainly would not punish those who had valid reason to doubt, or those who were raised in other religions
3) if "god" is omniscient and IF "god" created humans, then "god" knew BEFORE it created humans that it would create hell and torture 99+% of all humans for eternity
   3A) If you date the first humans from stone tools, that's 2.5 million years ago.  If you go with the preachers, it's 6000 years ago.  Let's take the smaller number and consider that the message only came through a tiny little desert tribe.  If a being (that supposedly created billions of galaxies) was capable of communicating with a single tribe, then it was capable of getting the message to ALL of the humans on this insignificant little planet. If a deity really existed, (and it wanted human worship for some reason) there would be only one religion. 


I could go on for a while but that's a big wall of text as it is . . .