Did You Fear Hell As A Child?

[noob]

Being raised in a COC I was afraid of hell but usually I was more worried about all of the non-COC people that were going to burn for eternity. What really terrified me was judgment day! I was horrified at the idea that I was going to stand in front of god and he was going to tell EVERYONE about all of my sins! Holy Crap!!! Everyone is going to know about that???

 

I will admit that every once in a while right after my deconversion I would wonder… what if I’m wrong? What if there really is a hell? I’m past that now but you know, I still don't want to watch those hell videos!

[Maiandra]

As a child I thought the idea of being sent to suffer in Hell for all of eternity was so obscenely horrible that it simply must not be true, that a God who loved you just plain wouldn't do that. I thought that maybe a few really, really awful people, like Hitler, might have been sent there, but not your average rapists and murders and what not and surely not anyone I knew. It seemed like massive overkill, like it was just meant to be metaphorical to highlight the 'badness' of sinning. I probably would have believed in purgatory if anyone had ever told me what it was. My church focused more on the Jesus loves you type stuff, so probably most of my knowledge of Hell came from pop culture and not the church itself.

 

It actually didn't occur to me for a long time that people actually could be afraid of it. Several times my parents tried to scare me with "you're going to go to Hell!" type speeches, but since I had already decided (and never told them) that Hell was only for the very few utterly irredeemably evil people in the word, I found this insulting instead of frightening. I assumed they were trying to convey the message that people who didn't attend church were unspeakably evil. It wasn't until years later that I figured out they were trying to scare me. I was a teenager at the time; they ought to have gotten started a lot earlier and it might have worked...