Thinking about converting, but what if I do go to Hell??...

[dave4shmups]

Alright, don't laugh now! I've been a Christian for over 10 years, but want to become an atheist. But how do I know that there is no Hell, that God has never spoken to me (I've had thoughts come into my mind that I don't think are my own), etc? Also, I've read a lot of books by people like Lee Strobel, and they seem pretty convincing evidence for the Bible and for the resurrection.

But I have read Dawkins book "The God Delusion", and loved Sam Harris book "Letter to a Christian nation" and loved the latter!!

All I know is that the idea of a God and Hell and demons influencing people seems like nonsense to me now. So please help me out here with my doubts!

[Minimalist]

Any bullshit spouting preacher ( which is all of them ) will tell you that if you have read those books it is already too late.

May as well send in the membership fee and join up. We take Pay Pal.

[fr0d0]

You can send us a postcard

[Ashendant]

hell serves a purpose in religion to scare believers out of doing bad acts, because churches and believers believe without the threat of eternal damnation everyone will be a bastard to everyone.

If you believe religion exists the fear of hell will continue to persist in you, if you move from religion the fear of hell will slowly move itself out.

I also know that the fear of hell is the 3rd hardest thing a atheist must suffer to free itself from religion so meh, social stygma is the second and threats of death the first

[Shell B]

The simple answer to the question you posed in the title is that you will go to hell. However, that's nonsense.

People have thoughts that just seem to pop into their heads all the time. That's not god. It's called intrusive thoughts.

As for helping you, I think you need to go with what you think. Simply put, you're an atheist when you stop believing in god. So long as you hang on to the notion that he might be real, you are something else.

[The_Flying_Skeptic]

What if you go to hell? The way I handle that question is reminding myself that I am already going to hell according to other (non-Christian) religions. Is there any reason for me to fear one hell more than the other, if they do exist? In other words, is there more reason to believe in one major religion than another? I've been reading about religion and talking to people about religion for a long time and I have found that all religions are equally unsubstantiated.

I'm glad that you've taken the time to study both sides of the issue. I haven't read the God Delusion or any of Sam Harris's books. I've seen most of their speeches and interviews and debates with people. I've read most of Richard Carrier's "Sense of Goodness without God: defense of metaphysical naturalism" and the "The Portable Atheist (with commentaries by Hitchens)". I saw the movie based on Lee Strobel's book about the 'resurrection' of Jesus and his defense of the gospels. He lost his credibility, in my opinion, (in the film) when he listed a bunch of events concerning Jesus's life and threw out an astronomical improbability for those events to have occurred which I think is not objective especially in the context that most of the people watching this video do not understand probability theory. I should watch the video again and write out my concerns but he also disappointed me in his book A Case for a Creator where he used multiple straw-man arguments concerning abiogenesis.

[DiRNiS]

Once you understand the hell is nothing but the product of human imagination along with every god, including the god of the bible, you should have no problem.

It seems that you are still clinging to your religion. You have the right idea about gods, demons and hell being nonsense. So why persist on thinking about it?

[Xyster]

read Guy P Harrisons book 50 reasons peopel give for believing in a god.. good book that should help clear up any other questions in your head.

[Entropist]

The ever-quotable E.M. Cioran:

"To believe in the reality of salvation you must first believe in the reality of the Fall: every religious act begins with the perception of hell—the raw material of faith—heaven comes only afterwards, a kind of corrective, a consolation; a luxury, a superfetation, an accident required by our bias in favor of symmetry and balance. Only the Devil is necessary."

[Tiberius]

We don't know that there isn't a hell, but believing because there is a threat of hell is known as "Pascal's wager", and it has been debunked so many times as bad reasoning.

The argument I like best about it is the argument that there might be a God who only rewards atheists with Heaven, and sends all believers to Hell (or Heaven too, I dunno, everything is possible). To put it simply, for every God someone can think up that sends atheists to Hell, we can think up an alternative God that doesn't.

Unless there is any direct evidence for any of these Gods, there is no point in believing one way or the other.