Hanging up on Hell

[robvalue]

Teaching the concept of hell to young children is about the most disgusting form of psychological damage you can legally get away with.

Clearly the promise of rewards wasn't enough to keep people in submission, so they had to add threats too.

The weirdest thing happened a couple of months ago. I had a second of complete irrationality. Around about a second, literally. This thought flew into my head, "Oh my god, what if hell is real! I'm going to suffer forever!" In that second, I felt terrified. Afterwards, whatever the hell (hehe) happened to me passed on by, and I was fine again. It did give me an insight into how horrific it must be to live with such a possibility being real in your head.

But it's not real, it's absolutely ridiculous. My tip is always to think about how many other religious hells you've worried about, probably the answer is zero. This is no different. All religions worship the same thing... yep, you got it.

If you must torment your children with hell as a substitute for some actual proper parenting, at least let them get old enough so that you're not raping their brain while they are utterly reliant on you for facts. Anything you can't even convince us of without using broken arguments or appealing to faith is not a fact. Let them get to about 7 without religious exposure, and see what they think of your fairy stories then.