Evangelical Christian beliefs terrified me when I was a small boy with a Baptist minister father. Don't get me wrong, he was a good guy and a loving dad who was great with kids.

It was the belief system itself that left me frightened and often unable to sleep – the thought that many of my school friends were going to burn in hell for eternity. The idea that people all over the world who had never gotten the "good news" would suffer the wrath of God left me filled with ... I don't even know the right words for it, but it was awful.

The thought that I lived in a universe ordered for and defined by torture and cruelty was too much to take, and I hadn't even turned 11 yet.

By the time I turned 16, I rejected the belief system entirely, helped along by the Evangelical fetish for science denial, for refusing to read the creation stories in Genesis as myth or allegory.

But I've never quite gotten over Evangelical language twisting and redefinition of ordinary words like love. I've never gotten over how Evangelical Christians can claim God is about love, when their God is clearly a torturing monster. I've never gotten over how they refuse to admit that, and it makes me mistrust them deeply. Their minds are twisted, and their thinking is twisted, and I don't think they tell the truth most of the time. I think they lie most of the time, because their belief system teaches them that that's the only possibility for living without going insane.

Because if you can say that sending most of humanity to burn in hell and be tortured for eternity is about love, you have to be lying to yourself and everyone else. You just have to.