Has fear of hell influenced your thinking?

Not me…I grew up in a family that believed in God, they did not walk in freedom, as there was much bondage, but, they had faith. And that faith was real. And they loved God. They also had a healthy respect for his word, and his ways, even if they were too weak to walk in them. My father was an abusive alcoholic, my mother had her issues… due to sexual abuse as a child, and then by marrying an alcoholic, who had once been saved, and taught Sunday School. However, Satan, somehow tripped him up, I always thought it was thru loosing a boy child, when that baby was 2, however, I do not know this for sure. But, something took him down. He had a beautiful family, with 2 lovely daughters, a very good job, a nice home. And he ended up loosing all of that… and coming down to poverty… and alcohol…he is dead, and so is my mother, and there is noone else left to tell me the whole story… But, my mother married him… and then me and my sister were born, both parents were older than most, when this happened. My childhood was rough. I was sent to church, but, they did not take me. Somehow, I developed a love for God, in the middle of all of this. I can still remember being on my knees at the kitchen table, reading from the big family bible, learning the 23rd. psalms, and the Lords prayer. I suppose that my parents led me to this two things, I am not sure, I just know that they were very precious to me, and I memorized them both. They are still as precious to me now, as they were then.

I later tried to be “saved”… when I was about 10, my dad had taken his life by then, and my mother took us to church. This church believed in “praying thru”, meaning that one prayed until he “felt God in his spirit”. I tried, but, I could not get what they were experiencing. Later we got out of church, when the Methodist moved the pastor, which they still do today. I suppose we had our eyes upon the pastor, and not upon Christ… however… that is what happened… I married early.. to avoid a chaotic home life… lived life my way , for many years. Enjoyed sin… and what the world had to offer… untill… God brought me to the end of myself… when this happened, I was empty… I called out to God one night, asking him if this is all there was in life for me… having experienced a new home, a new car, a loving husband, etc… he met me at my point of need. And that was June 1985.

When I woke up the next morning, after that very short prayer, or heart cry… I was different…something had happened to me, overnight… I was changed. .. I wanted to go to church, and I knew which one I wanted to go to. I also had a hunger for Gods word. All of this came from God…not me… I was not able to bring about this change in myself. But, God was, and did. And it is still lasting… 23 years later… I could write a book about everything that has happened in between then and now. and maybe one day, I will. but, for now, I will just share this, for it fits perfectly with this post.

I have never had a fear of hell… not then… not now… but, this is only because I have a true love for God, and for the things of God. I do not serve him out of fear, I serve him out of love. And hope that you can too…

God Bless…

As a child I was taught that hell was a real place created for Satan and all those who would not accept Christ. I do not recall ever having a significant fear of going to hell. My greatest fear was evangelism. As a child of 8 or 10, it’s terribly frightening to try to share your faith with a stranger knowing that, if you didn’t and s/he died without Christ, their blood would be on your hands (so to speak). My entire childhood was one big mass of guilt and fear because I rarely ever gathered the courage to witness.

As I grew older and realized that Christianity is largely myth and hell doesn’t exist, I began to consider how the fear of hell affects other people. I never cease to be amazed by those who claim to believe just so they won’t go to hell (as if going to church alone were a free pass). I have come to realize that people who center their faith on fear usually end up far worse off than they started.

Yes, proselytize means attempting to convert. There is one poster on here who is notorious for turning every post into a lengthy sermon no matter what the original question, and that’s what I didn’t want.

flossheal: It sounds like your conversion to Christianity was more influenced by spiritual needs in this life. However, once you converted, did you have to accept church doctrines and teachings that didn’t make sense to you, or didn’t fit with your concept of God?

jasont: America’s school systems have little or nothing to do with the use of hell as a conversion tool. The church has been using hellish imagery for centuries to influence people, and many denominations and churches still do today.

toadaly: I agree completely about not reconciling the concept of a loving, benevolent God with a place of eternal torture, whether physical or spiritual. That’s something I struggled with a lot and still do.

But even if you don’t believe in hell, I know some agnostics who fear the concept of it, only because of the imagery they were raised with. In their case, I guess the wager is still something that influences them.

I think it’s a non-religion-specific word which means ‘evangelism’. The e-word only refers to Christians spreading their faith, whereas ‘proselytising’ refers to any religion doing the same. Does that sound about right, kingofpop?

Apologies for having a specific religious affiliation, here, kingofpop. I’m not proselytising, as far as I know, though…

I was brought up in a liberal Christian home where my mum told me she thought everyone went to heaven; there was no hell.

Later on, as a young adult, I felt very much in need of God’s forgiveness for some specific things in my life. I wasn’t thinking that those things would send me to hell, particularly; my problem was with the way my life was messed up there and then. I looked for His forgiveness and found it. I knew that from then on I was following Him - I was a Christian.

Some months later someone asked me if I knew for sure I was going to heaven, and I had no idea. I simply hadn’t looked into the theology of it at that point.

Therefore, I’m pretty certain that it was considerations in the here-and-now, rather than ‘fear of hell’ that influenced my decision to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour.

I’ll be interested to see how that compares with your other replies. It’s a good question.

No wonder they say America’s school systems are no good. I don’t think the fear of Hell should influence anyone. what exactly is proselytising?

No, it doesn’t influence my thinking. I don’t believe in hell. Even if I had, it still wouldn’t. I wasn’t raised religously, but I was told biblical stories and about hell and heaven, that I started to disbelieve when I was around 8-9 years old, after learning things about the earth in school.

NO SUCH HELL proof http://gracehead.com/index.php/2007/10/28/p287 the myth http://gracehead.com/index.php/2006/03/01/p258 God, hates “hell” http://trumpetcallofgodonline.com/index.php5?title=Proclaim_NOT_the_Hell_of_the_Church_of_Men…In_Their_Word_is_No_Mercy_Found%2C_Only_the_Makings_of_Satan

I didn’t think about Hell much until my faith started to waver.

When I was 12 I was trying to decide if God really existed. For a couple of weeks I alternated between thinking of Christianity as myths, taboos, and superstition from a simpler time and praying as hard as I could for God to forgive me.

Nobody presented Pascal’s Wager to me (at least not formally) but it is intuitively obvious to anyone who was going through what I was.

The conclusion I came to is the truth can not be held ransom. Any school of thought that relies on terrorism to spread its message is not strong enough to stand on its own. I see the fact that mainline Christianity threatens believers to keep them in the fold as evidence that it isn’t true.

The fear of hell obviously only affects people who believe in hell. That’s why Pascal’s wager is really an apologetic argument for the faithful, rather than a tool for conversion.

In my believer days, I couldn’t accept that hell was actually a place of eternal torture. That just didn’t fit with my concept of god. Now I’m an atheist. In a nutshell, hell was always a somewhat irrelevant concept to me.