Adverse Religious Experiences Support Thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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This thread is for people to share about lingering issues they have from adverse religious experiences and what if anything they have done to overcome them.

In middle school I became a born-again Evangelical Christian. I was pretty much insufferable to be around. I took my Bible to class with me and witnessed at every possible opportunity, like that kind of insufferable.

I was going through various types of parental abuse and I think I just needed something certain to cling to. But in many respects it started mirroring my abusive upbringing. I became obsessed with making God proud of me and becoming morally perfect. And I constantly fell short.

When I was about twelve I started attending a Pentecostal church with my best friend. She had a crazy holy roller mother and severe psychiatric problems. Her first suicide attempt was age 9. And one of the first things she told me was that she pushed one of her friends down the stairs. She really looked up to me and her mother kind of held me out as an example for her to follow.

So according to this church, demons were everywhere, we had to constantly guard against them and speak in tongues and rebuke them in the name of Jesus. This made going about my everyday life rather frightening. Like I was in this constant hyper vigilant state to guard against evil.

I had this one experience I couldn’t shake.

One night I was at my friend’s house with her mother and my friend sensed a demon in the stairwell so we went to the kitchen. Her mother started spouting Bible verses and we were listening to Christian radio and the guy on the radio started quoting the same verse, so, you know, God was watching. Then, from what I remember, my friend said she didn’t feel well and put her head down. Her mother started speaking in tongues. My friend left and went into the bathroom and started convulsing all over the floor. She was completely unconscious. Her mother implored me to lay hands on my friend and exorcise the demon inside her daughter. So, I did. I started speaking in tongues and saying all the standard exorcism things. I was really scared for my friend.

A bit later my friend regained consciousness and was very confused. After it was all over, we were so scared that night we camped out in the kitchen, away from the demonic stairwell.

I realize this all sounds ridiculous but I was twelve, and I experienced it as very real. Long after I became an atheist I still could not figure out exactly what the hell happened that night. Until I was in my mid-thirties and I had my first ever grand mal seizure. I now understand that my friend had an untreated seizure disorder that her mother attributed to demons. She also was probably later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, no thanks in large part to her crazy mother.

My mother at that point pulled me out of that church, one of her better parenting decisions in retrospect. Not long after, I lost my friend, as she had a bad experience witnessing my mother’s abuse against me and neither of us were allowed to go to each other’s houses any more.

But I think the damage was done.

I recently started reading a book called The Diabolical Trinity about Hell indoctrination, or the instilled fear of what the author calls eternal conscious torment. He talks about Hell indoctrination as a legit trauma, which has caused me to rethink my past experiences with Christianity and the effect they have on me today.

I don’t think you can really extricate this trauma from the other trauma going on in my life at the time. It all seemed to reinforce my sense of constant danger.

But I think that in particular has had enduring effects. One of my greatest fears is torture. I’ve had episodes of severe anxiety in the past thinking about people who have been through torture or are going through it right now. The idea of eternal torture is so hard for me to bear. Even though I’m not Christian and am agnostic at best, I still wake up sometimes afraid I’m going to hell.

I’ve also been reading a book called Heaven and Hell: A Brief History of the Afterlife which helps contextualize the development of Hell indoctrination throughout history and see how much ideas of the afterlife changed throughout time. It shows how Jesus’ view of the afterlife was very much in line with Jewish beliefs at the time and had no concept of eternal torment, just resurrection of the good Israelites and permanent extinction of the bad (i.e. death.) This has helped me get a more rational handle on things.

More generally I think I have always had a fear of “Doing the Wrong Thing.” I’ve had struggles even as an atheist, and now as a Buddhist, with trying to figure out the Right thing to do and be morally perfect. I’ve had to cut that off at the knees as I get more into Buddhist practice because I really didn’t want to recreate my own past personal hell as a Buddhist.

I know this is long, but I just wanted to share this somewhere and find out if anyone else struggles in this way.

This should go without saying but no evangelism please.

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We grew up quite similar. I, too, grew up evangelical with a Pentacostal bent to it.

The good news is that I got to grow up homeschooled as a result and didn’t have to suffer through 8 AM to 4 PM schooling like the other kids, which might have wrecked my ADHD brain. That spared me a lot of stress. The bad news is growing up constantly being gaslit, being told to accept and believe and forgive false teachings indefinitely.

I also grew up with a fear of hell. In fact, it was so ingrained that any time I burned myself, such as on a hot stove, I would immediately think, “That was only 1 second, but Hell is trillions of years long.”

But it was really the constant erosion of reality that wore down my brain. I grew up in a religious, somewhat cult-like organization that had books teaching things like, “If you put rice grains in two jars, and you speak blessings to one and curses to the other, the blessed one will remain white while the cursed one will turn black.” Even my devout-charismatic friend thought that was insane.

I had posted about this in another thread, but eventually, what got me to deconstruct was realizing that I was being forced to apply a double standard to everything. Christianity was to be held to the lowest of standards of evidence, while everything non-Christian was to be held to a tough, high, standard of evidence. One moment that stands out in my memory is, as a sports fan, realizing with a jolt one day that I could more easily find statistics for an NBA game - complete with box score, rebounds, three-pointers and roster names - than I could for the evidence of God or events in the Bible.

As someone already dealing with mental illness (OCD,) the thing a mentally-ill person needs the most is a strong, stable core of reality. But the more I asked my mother to stop being irrational (because her irrational behavior was making my OCD worse and eroding my pillar of reality,) the more she continued on craziness. She started talking about “the courts of heaven” (this notion that you can behave like an appellate or petitioner in heaven with particular procedures,) talking about her belief in Sadhu Selvaraj (a charlatan Indian Christian,) Kevin Zadai, etc. I was fed a constant diet of nonsense, like hearing preachers saying “I tell all the children here that they will never be sick for one day in their lives” (paraphrased). She also said, “If Biden wins (in 2020,) you can forget about being able to go to church again.” My OCD got to the point where I began connecting all kinds of things together and thinking all sorts of things were God punishing me for this or that.

I’ve always been a late bloomer, so it’s unsurprising that it took me 1-2 decades later to deconstruct than my siblings (who were much more astute and deconstructed far sooner.) But better late than never I guess.

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I got saved at age 19. I am happy about it. I don’t witness to people, if God wants them saved, He will make it happen.
I have known a very few holier than thou people, who tell you how they love Jesus more than you, its sad. Something about being a christian can make people be jerks, in a way I have never seen with atheists.

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I’m impressed that you were able to do it at all! My brother and I also had a religious upbringing, although not to the degree of what’s being described in this thread, and it took me many years to shake it off. My brother never did.

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One of the things in the Diabolical Trinity book is the idea that people basically invented hell because it eases the cognitive dissonance of wishing bad things on people which is frowned upon in Christianity.

“Oh, no, I of course love you, it’s God that will punish you for all eternity!”

Right.

Also, I have learned, the idea of an eternal soul separate from the body is a pagan belief that influenced early Christian writers.

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When I was 10 or so, my best friend came from a super religious family. Not overtly evangelical, but just obviously took religion way more seriously than my own (still moderately religious) household.

We both had a Commodore 64 and liked playing games on it. There was a magazine called Compute!'s Gazette that had programs at the end that you could type in, including simple games. The programs were long and tedious to type in, but I had the idea of recruiting my friend to help and then we could both play the game. I found one that happened to have “Demon” in the title (looking at magazine archives, I think it was a sci-fi shooter called Demon Star) that looked fun.

I asked my friend and he asked his mom. Who promptly shut down the project. It was obvious from the response that the problem was anything remotely to do with “demons”. She believed demons were real and that the game was somehow a way of letting them into your computer where they’d manipulate you. Or something.

Even at 10, I knew that was totally absurd. The game wasn’t even about demons! It was just part of the name. And just a stupid computer program anyway. The entire program was printed right there. You can’t summon a demon with a few pages of computer listings.

That was probably the first time that I really saw how ridiculous religion could be, as well as the adults who believed in it. Which isn’t to say that I was immediately 100% atheist, but it sure did poke a hole in the veil.

Later, I read something about self-hypnosis and mentioned it to my friend. Again, my friend relayed a response from his mother: hypnosis will lower your defenses and let demons invade your body. I still didn’t believe in demons but that actually scared me a bit. It made me wonder if I could somehow get stuck in a hypnotized state and never leave. I guess maybe I thought that reports of people being invaded by demons were actually people somehow permanently hypnotizing themselves. Anyway, I got over that one but it did affect me for a time.

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Wow @Spice_Weasel, that was a wild experience. If it’s any consolation, at least you didn’t have to spend money on drugs and firearms like some others of us did to reach that level of weirdness.

My story is basic: I was either being ignored or being reminded that I had no value nor future. And I can highly vouch for Roman Catholicism as a means of inflicting that on another human being.

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You might want to listen to some of what Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong has to say about hell being an invention of the church. https://youtu.be/SF6I5VSZVqc?si=YlAp6vRKe_JanHn0

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Heh. We once went to a restaurant serving BBQ wings, and there was a little bottle of hot sauce on the table with a cartoon devil. You know, because hell is hot.

My Mom lost her shit. Complained to the manager and then flounced out of the restaurant.

She was a Karen before they were (un)cool.

My husband read an interesting book about Satanic panic related to tabletop gaming and other harmless diversions called Dangerous Games. He said it was really well written. It’s on my TBR list.

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I grew up in a strict hellfire and brimstone church. No dancing. No musical instruments. Church attendance multiple times per week was mandatory. Full immersion baptism when you were old enough. Our church was the only true church and everyone else goes to hell. I was fully into it growing up but all my life I have pondered things and one thing I couldn’t shake in my pondering was that last point: Our church is the only true church. How can everyone else be wrong? How can the luck of being born in a country with this church nearby be fair?

Shortly after starting college I decided that religions were BS because too many have that belief that you must believe exactly what they believe to be saved. If that is the case, God is an asshole. And it is this exact point that makes me think of Emo Philips joke about religion.

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I’m finding this thread painful to read and almost too painful to participate in right now, but here goes: my mom wouldn’t allow me to eat Red Hots candy, because of the little devil on the package at the time. She fully believed such things had real demonic power and that Christians were required to be ever vigilant and shun any and all “satanic” imagery of any kind, or risk demonic possession and/or God’s wrath. It got much worse than that later on.

I will elide over years of insanity and note that all my mom’s super-fundy friends cut her dead when a couple of seriously bad things happened to her, because clearly she didn’t have enough faith to achieve God’s favor. They told her the bad things were her fault because her faith wasn’t strong enough, and that, mercifully, was the sharply defined end of my mom’s participation in that kind of religion. I’d spit on any of those people if I came across them today; they are among the worst people on earth.

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That is what I keep coming back to. Why would you worship such an asshole God? I would never harm a hair on my child’s head and anyone who hurt him would be dead to me. But I’m supposed to worship a God who would torture my son for all eternity for something completely out of his control - what he does or does not believe?

I’m supposed to worship a God who is less compassionate than I am?

That is insane.

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The other thing that always caught my attention - even from childhood - was that if this God did torture people forever, then Christians sure didn’t seem to behave as if it were the case.

If 95% of the world’s people are truly burning in horrific torment forever (like, trillions of years,) you’d think that would be by far the most urgent crisis in all of human history. Christians ought to be scrambling about like mad, 24/7, trying to save souls. One atheist had said that if he believed in Hell, he’d be willing to crawl ten miles on his knees on broken glass to save just one soul. But the average Christian spent something like…just half an hour per year in evangelism.

That was one of the biggest tip-offs to me that this whole thing was extremely hollow, or at least not believed by Christians themselves.

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Not nearly as bad an experience with religion than others in this thread, but I was an 8 year old boy when my father died. Cancer and resulting pneumonia.

He was catholic. We lived across from a catholic church and nunnery.

Sister motherfucking Geraldine, and her assorted nuns flooded the house, preventing my mother space to grieve, and telling me that I need to be strong and praising me for not crying? You fucking old crone, I was an eight year old boy. I needed to cry. I needed to grieve with my mother.

As is not suprising, that was the end of any religious interest I ever had, personally.

I will give religion some credit, though, or at least the westernised religions with which I am familiar:
I attended High Anglican schools, and spent my entire school service in the choir. Not that I believed, but I did, and still do love the music that true believers created, not for themselves, but for their god.

I kind of admire that selflessness, even though I would mock him if I could time travel and meet one of my favourite composers, J.S. Bach. I mean, really, “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring”. It is one of my very favourite songs, but, christ, Johann Sebastian, Jesu never existed!

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I’m really sorry.

I like the music too. I occasionally sing old hymns. My favorite is How Great Thou Art.

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You should save more often. As it is you will lose a lot of time if you have to do a restore.

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The concept of punative vs. rewarding afterlives long predates Christianity and it’s unusually touchy-feely sentiments. Behavior-dictated afterlives were probably invented to attempt to control behavior of the population by the ruling class. And it depends on what behavior the ruling class wants, for instance rewarding afterlives going to those who died being warriors on the battlefield. Also, in brutal, oppressive times one of the few ways an average person could escape from oppression is suicide. The invention of post-death punishment conveniently removes that escape route and saves on shrinkage in the inventory of slaves, soldiers, and serfs.

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Spice Weasel, do you actually believe that you spoke in tongues or were you just mimmicking the jabbering that you witnessed in your church?

I grew up in a christian home, not evangelical or charismatic. My grandparents (Dad’s parents) were evangelical assembly of God. Speaking tongues, dancing filled with the holy ghost, very charismatic, alter calls would last about 30-40 minutes after a service. My brother and I would spend saturday nights about once month and go to church with them. I saw the service and the behavior as such a spectacle…there was a lot more going on there than our traditional boring church. I was exposed to their church for about 5 years ages 3-8. It alway impressed me as a show to draw people in.

I have bounced around protestant religions most of my life, but haven’t gone to a church regularly for about the last 10 years. I can’t find a church home that reconciles with my very simple theological faith. And I’ve seen that the church and religion in general have done way more harm than good as it comes to loving our neighbors as ourselves.

All the best on your journey.

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“What does God need with a backup drive?”

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What I was doing was glossolalia, which has been found by linguists to be a random reorganization of phonemes of the speaker’s native language. What’s tricky is that it’s not just making shit up in the conventional sense. According to research, it involves some kind of altered brain state. To really do it you have to bypass the cerebral cortex. To really do this as opposed to make shit up is a really powerful religious experience. So yes, I really did it in the sense that I wasn’t just mimicking what I heard. I felt completely out of control of my speech while doing it.

So at the time I thought this was the holy spirit. I now think it’s some kind of weird quirk of our brains. But I think people who have not spoken in tongues don’t realize that it’s a kind of skill. The same way people can reach meditative states of fundamental well-being, people can speak in tongues. I would bet that anyone can learn to do it regardless of beliefs. I’d be interested to know if anyone has ever studied that.

I imagine if you were worshipping your God or something and through prayer your body suddenly started doing this it would be very easy to conclude it was divinely inspired. I mean how else do you explain it?

Even though I don’t think it’s divinely inspired I don’t think we really have a good explanation of it even now. I might look into this more because it’s been a while since I’ve looked for research on it.