RE: Do Christians really believe most of us are going to hell?
June 30, 2014 at 9:26 pm
(This post was last modified: June 30, 2014 at 9:27 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(June 30, 2014 at 8:18 am)Irrational Wrote: Did you think much about hell during that time? How young were you?
I was eleven or so when I was at my most fervent. I thought about Hell sometimes, mainly when reading Scripture, which I did with some regularity. It didn't help that my youthful prurience drew me to books like Revelation which were of course loaded with terrifying imagery.
And when I started losing my faith, at thirteen and fourteen, part of me was for a while scared shitless because I knew that my doubts would damn me.
It was sometime before my fifteenth birthday that I realized that no matter what, I had no faith, and that nothing would change that except for evidence of the highest order. I guess you could say at that point that I decided to stop worrying about Hell, and instead focused on finding my way through the thicket of philosophies, woo-merchants, and self-delusions to discover the real meaning of rational thinking. Oddly enough, the strongest kick in that direction was taking Euclidean Geometry in high school. The exacting reasoning required by that course was good training for understanding how antecedents and consequents interact.
So, the short answer is, yes, I thought of Hell quite a bit, until I realized it probably wasn't real.