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Goodbye Jesus

I Hate Fear, Its Destroying Me.


rocklobster

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as many of you know the feeling of the fear or anxiety of what scripture from the bible can produce, im just hoping i can

get some more help here on my journey to overcome this fear.

 

it seems that intellectually i can let go of almost everything in the bible. except end time prophecy.

 

right now i guess the changes that this earth is experiencing, global warming, overpopulation, depletion of

natural resources, sources of edible fish dying from over fishing.

 

its scaring the hell out of me. I think if none of these issues were going on i wouldnt have this fear of jesus

coming back to send the believers to heaven and the others to hell (me). this voice in the back of my head

tells me "look at the world, its collapsing on itself, humans are destroying it, and you wont be saved when god comes to intervene" or "look, see bible prophecy was right, everything bad is happening now."

 

im reading this book called leaving the fold and its helping me become more aware of what these feelings are saying to

me. I feel like ive moved on from almost all of the indoctrination, i just cant let go of that last hold it has on me. Theres an

empty void i feel like that needs to be filled before i can let go of this idea that were living in the end times.

 

ugh, its so exhausting as you all may know jumping through these mental hoops. and like many of you

have read from my previous posts, i wasnt even a part of the church for too much longer than i am having with

leaving it. (8 months)

 

I cant believe such a short time in something like this could have such a mental impact on my life.

 

i dont know where to go from here, i feel like my answer to this fear wont be answered. all i read and hear on the news

is shit getting worse. this just makes it all the more difficult for me to just function without worry or fear of an after life of torture.

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Would it help you to know this:

 

When I was growing up all the preachers and pastors were talking about how a nuclear war was right around the corner and they said they could back it up with scriptures? I joined right in and we combed through the Bible to prove that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were going to launch an attack. People my age, including me, were afraid of having a family and living life because the rapture was going to happen any minute (definitely before the end of the 1980's) and what was the point of anything anyway. Decades later none of it happened. And yet the preachers don't say they were wrong and they won't say the Bible was wrong.

 

Look at Harold Camping. His predictions were completely bankrupt. And when they didn't come true he was completely perplexed. But when he was making them he was guaranteeing that the Bible says the world was going to end six months ago. At least he had the guts to quit making predictions. Too bad he didn't have the guts to say the Bible is wrong. For centuries now Christians like Camping have been making these kind of predictions about the world ending in their time. They were always wrong. The Seventh Day Adventist group formed because a man kept saying Christ was going to come back on a given day and he kept getting it wrong.

 

The Book of Revelation was written a short time after the Roman Jewish war. It's author was angry. He probably lost most of his friends an family. Those who were not killed in the war but couldn't escape were taken to Rome and worked to death building the Colosseum. He was the victim of genocide. So when he wrote that book it was a dream about how people from his country were going to be saved from Rome in his lifetime. Some of the images in that book are considered to be code for Emperor Nero who was a horrible monster of a human. Remind yourself that nothing in the Book of Revelation is about you.

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People my age, including me, were afraid of having a family and living life because the rapture was going to happen any minute (definitely before the end of the 1980's) and what was the point of anything anyway.

OMG me too!! I feel so brain damaged from all this fear, not to mention bad decisions I made because the end was nigh.

 

rocklobster, I agree with MM: we need to consider the context (and the fact that there were plants with psychotropic properties on the island on which Revelations was written--[read: acid trip] eek.gif )

 

Also, I have come to think that truth is unknowable. There is no real way to know the truth about "end times" etc. etc. so, choose what you think is the best information based on best available evidence, and stand on it and move on.

 

Peace.

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If we get rid of Jesus coming back, hell, and an angry God, do you have anything else to be afraid of?

 

I found that "Perfect love" does "cast out fear". That is in the Bible.

 

God is love..........perfectly. God being love can not hurt you in any way. God is only for you and never against you. How can you learn to love rather then fear? To love means to only want the best for everyone..........all the time. It means getting your mind off of yourself and onto others. It is a mental exercise that you can learn in the way that you deal with your self. I am not sure that there is any way around it being a mind game. Google "Positive affirmation".

 

You have to train your brain. Good luck.

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If we get rid of Jesus coming back, hell, and an angry God, do you have anything else to be afraid of?

 

I found that "Perfect love" does "cast out fear". That is in the Bible.

 

God is love..........perfectly. God being love can not hurt you in any way. God is only for you and never against you. How can you learn to love rather then fear? To love means to only want the best for everyone..........all the time. It means getting your mind off of yourself and onto others. It is a mental exercise that you can learn in the way that you deal with your self. I am not sure that there is any way around it being a mind game. Google "Positive affirmation".

 

You have to train your brain. Good luck.

 

if you were able to take jesus, and any sort of diety that creates a hell and get rid of them, no i wouldn't be afraid any more.

 

most of the time im just simply afraid that global warming and other occurences are due to prophetic scripture from the new testament;

even if they havent happened yet, but seem like something that could potentially happen. I keep thinking that in 50 years jesus will come and intervene from people from destroying this world.

 

from the looks of things i have 2 options.

 

1. try to live a life accepting jesus as my savior. be miserable, but in hopes for a better afterlife...

 

definately not what i want.

 

2. try to move on from the religious doctrine and a fear of hell, and accept that the world is in shit right now because of humans and theres nothing

supernatural about it. all i can really do about it is try and do my small part to improve things. accept that i dont exactly know. do my best to not let

a fear of hell ruin my life.

 

im obviously choosing number 2. I am seeing a therapist right now. the positive affirmation is something i try. today especially its getting to me.

 

 

this is more of an outlet i guess. if anyone else has advice id love to hear it

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The world is in no worse shape than its ever been. News coverage is better, that's all.

 

Plagues, wars, natural disasters... they've always been a part of life on Earth. We seem prone to imagine and predict worst case scenarios, and it's not just in the Bible. The sky may be falling, but it always has been.

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it seems that intellectually i can let go of almost everything in the bible. except end time prophecy.

 

right now i guess the changes that this earth is experiencing, global warming, overpopulation, depletion of

natural resources, sources of edible fish dying from over fishing.

 

this voice in the back of my head tells me "look at the world, its collapsing on itself, humans are destroying it, and you wont be saved when god comes to intervene" or "look, see bible prophecy was right, everything bad is happening now."

 

If you want to overcome your fear, then you can't do what you did in your post. You may not simply point to things that you believe demonstrate we are living in end times. Rather, you must point to specific book, chapter, and verse that supports your conclusions. And don't make them some kind of vague, anyone can interpret it as anything they want kind of verse, either; rather, make it specific to demonstrate that the bible allegedly predicted the precise events you listed.

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it seems that intellectually i can let go of almost everything in the bible. except end time prophecy.

 

right now i guess the changes that this earth is experiencing, global warming, overpopulation, depletion of

natural resources, sources of edible fish dying from over fishing.its scaring the hell out of me..... "look, see bible prophecy was right, everything bad is happening now."

 

These are all man-made problems stemming directly from religious beliefs!!! The Christian religion's contribution to the problem is to treat the earth and all living things as possessions, without consideration for the earth itself or the beings on the receiving end. The end times scenario merely points out the result of us vs. them thinking, and how Christians have treated this "evil" world. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Rock, if you are going to be petrified of the end times, you must also go right back to the beginning of genesis....... the garden...adam and eve..... the fall... the talking snake........ and then later.........the human sacrifice of jesus by god?

The whole story leads to the book of Revelation.

 

Do you believe in the literal account of genesis? Because if you don't, Revelation can't come into play......Relevation was just a 'vision' that someone on magic mushrooms wrote about.They allowed this story to end the book called 'the holy bible' when they decided what they would allow in it. that's all there is to it....................

 

Best wishes for you ......................

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this is more of an outlet i guess. if anyone else has advice id love to hear it

 

Hell yes.

 

It is good to talk it out. Expect it to be talked out.

 

I enjoy arguing end time "philosophy" with Christians.

The whole way of looking at life as if God was going to intervene and fix the world is escapism and just plain BS. Fundamentalist have learned to hate life, the world they live in, and are just about the most negative thinking people there are. The arguing points towards that. It is a miserable way to live a life. It should be shown for what it is. It should be shown as a oppressive doctrine that does not even fit a rational God theology.

 

Keep kicking that dog! It will run off with it's tail between it's legs and you will feel like you figured some things out!

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I think end times prophecy is kind of narcissistic side effect of being human. Many people are too self-centered to imagine the world not coming to a complete stop or carrying on without them after they die, so it's comforting to think that it won't.

 

It's a hard pill to swallow thinking that within a few generations unless you were a public figure or come from a family with well documented history, nobody living will have any idea that you ever existed. Or care.

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I agree with florduh, the world is in no worse shape now than it has been. I looked up the worst earthquake ever and it was in 1960. The war with the most casualties was WWII and it was over in 1945. The most lethal tornado that we know of was in 1925.

 

As far as health goes, we have better preventative care now than ever in history. We're inoculated against diseases that used to kill people in childhood. We're better at treating cancer now than ever. We have reliable birth control.

 

And remember, in a time of 24-hour news channels, we hear about the same catastrophe over and over and over again, tricking our brain into thinking that a LOT of disasters are happening instead of the one.

 

Also, events make the news because they are unusual. No one reports on the thousands of planes that land safely everyday. That wouldn't boost ratings. You get higher ratings by reporting on the one plane crash out of 50,000 safe landings.

 

I grew up with television but I don't have it anymore and I think my mental health is better without it. I recommend you stop watching the news. Trust me, you won't miss something truly important because there are so many other people watching television that they'll fill you in on the really important stuff.

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I don't believe in the bible anymore, but when I did, I stopped believing in hell awhile back. While it's one if the most preached concepts in churches it's one of the smallest topics in the bible. it's mentioned more in the old testament but rarely in the new testament. Jesus is written as "the savior of ALL", not some. Christians have invented non biblical explanations for those that don't go to hell like babies and tribes in africa that have never heard of jesus. those explanations are to fill holes left by the bible. As said above if god is love then we will all get a chance when we die.

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There were always many things in the bible that I didn't believe were true, but the Book of Revelation was the biggest laughable pile of horseshit in the entire book.

 

When I used to read the bible, I mostly read it for the "inspirational" parts (Proverbs, Psalms, etc).

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as many of you know the feeling of the fear or anxiety of what scripture from the bible can produce, im just hoping i can

get some more help here on my journey to overcome this fear.

I think you're suffering from information overload as much as from religious decompression.

 

For me personally the most disturbing news reporting in recent days has been about that Moldy Marvin out at Penn State and all his young victims and the vast coverup / conspiracy that enabled him for decades. But even that can be taken in two basic ways: you can conclude that this is something new under the sun and reflects new societal lows. Or, you can assume it's all happened before and is in fact happening in other places, too, and be happy that with the increasing effectiveness of newsgathering and investigative reporting, one such case has been exposed, awareness has been brought to the problem, and there is a fighting chance that all kinds of inbred corruption will be exposed and corrected. Also, that this will give pause to other perverts as well as give courage to other victims, in this case and others, to come forward.

 

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Shit happens -- always has, always will. The world is not going to shit, it IS shit. And yet despite all that, the truth is that more things go right than wrong on balance or the human race wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

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"as many of you know the feeling of the fear or anxiety of what scripture from the bible can produce, im just hoping i can

get some more help here on my journey to overcome this fear."

 

Most of my fear (indoctrination) was gained by the pastor's droning on and scary talk from other fearful church members. Usually after I read some passage in the bible I was so confused by the ancient grammar that I didn't know what the hell I just read anyway or was non-plussed because I didnt know the cultural context of the bronze age. Then some churchy like the pastor would have to tell me what it meant. What I'm trying to say is god didnt pop into my living room and tell me that I would burn in hell if I didn't love Jebus, but it was actually people claiming to speak on god's (or the bible's) behalf. And people are generally full of crap. Misery loves company.

 

Here is a nice link I enjoy from time to time regarding all religions. http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/10-reasons-you-should-never-have-a-religion/

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Dude. You've posted stuff like this like 50x times. We obviously can't reason with you, and you can't reason with yourself. Go find a psychiatrist and get some anti-anxiety medication.

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Here is a nice link I enjoy from time to time regarding all religions. http://www.stevepavl...ave-a-religion/

midniterider, this is a very good article worth reading..........thank you! biggrin.png

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When I was in the early stages of deconverting (I had doubts and felt abandoned by God), my mental health really suffered because I thought about the stuff constantly and prayed desperately for God to give me more faith and so on, and felt even worse. Eventually, my sense of self-preservation kicked in and I made a conscious decision to stop praying and reading the Bible because the mental agony this caused was making me have suicidal thoughts.

 

At this point, I still believed Christianity to be The Truth, but I felt that it didn't apply to me - God had abandoned me. I tried to comfort myself by reasoning that maybe God wanted me to suffer like this so that I'd be able to help others who struggled with their faith and that He would restore my faith when it was time. Or maybe I'd had the wrong kind of faith and it had to be destroyed before God could show me a new, better way.

 

Anyway, I told myself that it was no use tormenting myself with unanswered prayers and that God would surely come and find me when He saw that the time was right. After this, it became easier not to obsess about religious things. Over the next few years, I tried to think about religion as little as possible. There were still a few occasions when I started thinking about Hell and was filled with fear, but it didn't happen too often.

 

As time passed, I occasionally allowed myself to think about Christianity again and found that my views had started changing. My subconscious must have been processing this stuff all along. I slowly started seeing Christianity from the viewpoint of an outsider and was finally able to think about its doctrines rationally, and realised it just didn't make any sense to me. This was wonderfully liberating!

 

So, the point of this rambling post is that maybe it would be best for your mental well-being if you tried to brush these issues under the rug for a while? Tell yourself that if there is a loving God, He will give you faith when He sees fit and no sooner. I don't know whether this is possible for you but it really helped me. The process of healing was long - I used to think I'd never get over losing my faith - but it got better and now I have no religious fears left.

 

All the best to you. I hope the therapy helps you.

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