converting back unto theism - yes it's true.

[Frank]

The "I used to be an atheist" line gives them a certain amount of street cred and makes an appeal to authority and popularity, attempting to confirm beliefs and rationalizations.

I had a conversation with my girlfriend yesterday and she told me that doubting her faith is a sin. I'm waiting until she's honest enough with herself to either confirm her belief or reject it based on reason, not fear of hell. I can see that every time we have a discussion, she gets quite irate and doesn't want to talk on the subject any more, as it may put bad thoughts into her head. She's a great person, and it kind of saddens me that something that she claims to believe gives her so much strife - she actively believes she is a bad person, the church convinced her of this.

Definitely, religion can damage our psychology. It does teach people they're naturally (and unavoidably) bad; and goodness can only come from submission to an invisible friend (and the degree of submission required is so obscurely defined, many run around constantly doubting themselves). Imagine believing that a god who likes to burn people in an eternal hell is probing your every thought. Not only that - but this moral cop inside our brain is supposedly so good and holy that we can never achieve his level of perfection, consequently even otherwise very good people (who don't have warped thoughts, like me, hahahahaaaa) run around constantly questioning the purity of their thoughts, apologizing to an invisible friend for thinking the wrong thing, and are deluded into thinking this sort of nonsense isn't a quintessential feature of superstition.

It's sad really.