Being raised a JW I had the belief that there was no pit of fiery and eternal torment. JWs believe that when you die, you simply cease to exist in any form and therefore are no longer aware of anything.
After I finally accepted that I was an atheist I occasionally had those doubts of "what if they're right?" It is part of the mental programming. You cannot simply wipe away decades of indoctrination and be completely free of the things you used to believe. When you have those doubts, reason it out and meditate on it. Don't just try to beat it with rote repetition; that's what created the problems in the first place.
After I finally accepted that I was an atheist I occasionally had those doubts of "what if they're right?" It is part of the mental programming. You cannot simply wipe away decades of indoctrination and be completely free of the things you used to believe. When you have those doubts, reason it out and meditate on it. Don't just try to beat it with rote repetition; that's what created the problems in the first place.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
