Hello All

[emjay]

My advice, as unsatisfying as it may be, is just to give it time... it'll fade with time. It took me quite a while to get over those fears as well, but in the end I did, and they hold no power over me any more, because there's no reasonable reason to believe them to be true. And the fear that comes from thinking they could exist, loses much of its power if you can learn to contrast them with other things you can conjure up in your imagination - which by the same token and in the same way 'could' exist (ie by being 'conceivable'... though the truth of that is actually debatable, are things possible just because we can conceive of them? Jury's still out for me on that one... there is a thread on here about that somewhere if you're interested) - which are equally unlikely to exist. Basically, once you are convinced that the idea is unreasonable and improbable, then however ingrained and pervasive the ideas are, you realise that they should hold no more weight than any other equally unreasonable random idea you can 'conceive' of. Getting to that point may take some time but once you're there, then you can look beyond the emotive power of an idea, that just comes about because it has such a long history in our culture and indoctrination, and just see it on equal footing with any other unreasonable but imaginative idea, no matter how silly.

[Silver]

It takes conscientious effort and willpower to overcome it. I only ever momentarily struggled with two fears: being gay and getting fired from a job. Overcame both relatively easily, because in the end dealing with fear is no way to live.

[Mister Agenda]

Welcome, C.J.!

I was raised on a steady diet of damnation and hellfire and found those fears lingered a while after I deconstructed my Christianity. If it's any help, for me that fear faded completely in time. It just became more and more difficult to take it seriously.