This! When I was 9 or 10 years old, I was so terrified most of the time that I had trouble falling asleep. It wasn't just nightmares of waking up in hell, it was my certain "knowledge" that the Christian God condemns most people to burning in hell, to eternal conscious torment.
The idea that most people I knew and that most people who ever existed were destined to an eternity of torture ... I just couldn't bear it. I spent much of my childhood anxious, sleepless, and existentially terrified and depressed. Because Christianity is such an evil, disgusting religion.
I sure believed in it, though!
Feeling unsafe is a somewhat weak way to put it. I was too young NOT to believe my parents could keep me safe, but I didn't believe it. I couldn't feel any sense of security anywhere.
And this was BEFORE I realized I was gay, and therefore subject of intense Christian hatred. That came a couple years later with Anita Bryant's "save the children" anti-gay campaign.
That gave me just one more reason to eventually recognize Christianity as a twisted, evil, disgusting religion.
Even non-fundamentalist forms of Christianity (but traditionalist ones, to distinguish from progressive Christianity, which is almost a completely different religion) teach the sickening theology that blood sacrifice is necessary to stop God from eternally consciously tormenting us.
I escaped that, because I understand that Christianity is evil, baseless, primitive superstitious garbage.
But far too many Christians are grounded in that sadistic world view. Is it any wonder that Christians are arrogant, judgmental monsters? They're simply emulating their twisted, sadistic "god."
The most respected Christian leaders in the world don't have to slightest compunction about describing us queer people with foul hate speech and treating us with the utmost disrespect.
Pope Francis called us f***** a few months ago, in two separate instances, while instructing fellow bishops and priests that gay men are unfit to train for the priesthood. Think Christian people would call him out for that? Hell, no! (with a sparse scattering of exceptions.) He refuses to allow allow reforms to overturn Catholic doctrines that we queer people are literally depraved and disordered. His evil church teaches hundreds of millions of school children from their disgusting catechism that we gay people commit acts of grave depravity, and that we are intrinsically disordered. I spit on those disgusting Catholic pigs!
Clearly, Pope Francis is twisted and evil. Yet people hold him up as a paragon of virtue! (To those people: I AM NOT DEPRAVED, but your religion is sickening and disgusting, just like YOU are sickening and disgusting.)
I can say the same about Justin Welby, the former Archbishop of Canterbury who recently had to resign because it turned out he had sheltered a sadistically sexually abusive priest.
Welby doesn't even try to pretend to be a decent person by following the teachings of Jesus. How do you reconcile what he did disinviting the same-sex married spouses of North American Anglican bishops to the Lambeth Conference, where they would have participated socially, sitting down and eating with bishops and other spouses?
I think Jesus taught something very different from what this disgusting, homophobic piece of shit did. Then at the conclusion of the conference, he announced to the world that people like me are sinners in the eyes of his church and that can never change.
This is supposedly "moderate" Christianity, but it's still disgusting evil. It's the kind of evil that Christians emulate constantly.
Meanwhile, as Welby was treating queer people like s*** and announcing that we're sinners, he had all along been sheltering a sadistic priest who was beating children bloody for sexual pleasure.
There's a reason many of us despise Christianity. Because most respected Christians are evil and disgusting, because their theologies are evil and disgusting.
Those of us who had to grow up with it have to try to get over it somehow.
Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't.
