I never cease to be astonished by how conservative Christians are conditioned to believing that mistreating people (even very badly) is an act of kindness.

But I shouldn't be astonished. My own teenage struggle against the abject cruelty baked into conservative Christian theology is why I became an atheist. Ultimately, I simply could not accept that the sadistic God of Christianity was worth modeling. I didn't want to be as cruel and evil as the Christian God, and eventually I realized I didn't have to be — that it was all just made up bullshit, and not even very credibly made up.