(November 19, 2013 at 11:44 am)themonkeyman Wrote: I was up until last night a good strong Atheist (snip)Seems as if you still have the subconscious terror of hell that was ingrained in you. This isn't surprising, as it seems the subconscious is very difficult to "reprogram." Which means that you will continue to have these episodes where a fear of hell terrorizes you for a time.
I have the fear of hell come back because of this so I need some encouragement out of this trap.
I would point out that you do not seem to have any fear or belief in god, just a very acute fear of hell. Seems as if you're a fairly "strong atheist", as you put it. But that mental land mine won't be so easy to get rid of. I don't think that there are any easy or automatic fixes for that, aside from confronting the fear whenever it arises. The better you understand that fear, the more progress you'll make in overcoming it, IMO.
"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
