Bruce, How Do You Handle Fear of God’s Wrath and Hell?

found online by Raymond

 
From former pastor Bruce Gerencser:

Many people exposed to Fundamentalist Christianity abandon it in their teenage years or when they go off to college. Others, such as myself and many of the readers of this blog, spent decades dutifully and faithfully serving the Christian God. I was part of the Christian church for fifty years, and I pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five of those years. Every crevice of my mind was saturated with Evangelical belief. The Bible said it is a fearful thing to fall under the hands of the living God, and I certainly feared God. In times of feeling guilt over my “sins” I felt that God was just around the corner waiting to mete out his wrath upon my life and my family. God lurked in the shadows, ready, able, and willing to chastise me for my sins. I may have been saved, but there were days I felt as if I was dangling over the pit of hell, and the only thing that kept me from falling in was God’s long-suffering patience.

It should come no surprise then, that people who grow up this way are indoctrinated and conditioned in such a manner that they have a deep reverence and fear of God. He was touted as the creator of all things who holds the entire universe in the palm of his hand. God was not one to be messed with. Yet, despite all of this, many of us left Christianity and embraced atheism, agnosticism, humanism, or some other non-Christian religion. We are so glad to be free from the bondage and chains of our Christian past.

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3 thoughts on “Bruce, How Do You Handle Fear of God’s Wrath and Hell?”

  1. It’s one thing to stop believing something, another to come to believe that there is no evidence for it, and yet another to believe that it is impossible. The last is the strongest form of rejection. Once I recognized that belief in Hell as eternal suffering cannot be reconciled with belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, merciful god, the fear of such punishment vanished.

    The alternative Christian belief that we non-believers will face temporary suffering after death to “cleanse” us so that we might be with God is another matter, but it is also much less threatening, so much less compelling as a reason to believe.

  2. We have quite enough of humanity’s ignorance, fear, wrath and hell on Earth. The case can easily be made that religions have harmed as much as helped with these problems.

    Maybe if we learn enough, and care enough, to work to ameliorate those ugly realities we won’t be so bothered by a hypothetical divine judgment. There may be a theological argument against this “humanist” approach, but not so much a logical one.

    Aldous Huxley’s “Island” is a vision of how a sane society can accomplish this goal.

    Unfortunately basic human decency is required, and we see that is becoming more suppressed these days. Jihadists and MAGA Christians scare me more than hellfire and damnation.

    Voltaire and Pascal remind us:

    “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

    “Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”

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