A few Saturdays ago I had the privilege of spending over an hour talking on the phone with Thomas Prosser, economic sociologist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Thomas contacted me a while back asking whether he could use material from my blog for a project he's working on. Then he asked to interview me for additional help with his project. With Thomas' permission, the next few entries feature questions Thomas asked me during the phone interview, along with my answers, derived from excerpts of the transcript of our interview, which I have adapted, modified, and in places expounded upon for the purposes of this blog.
Part One: Fear of Hell
Did fear of hell act as a barrier to your leaving the Christian faith?
It took me a long time to overcome my fear of hell. Even though Pascal’s Wager never made much sense to me, I took that bet for years out of fear. Emotionally, I couldn’t make the jump from Christian to atheist; thus, my de-conversion came in stages. Stage One is when I gave up paid ministry. Stage Two is when I stopped attending church, thus giving up organized religion. Stage Three is when I realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did when I was a Christian apologist, and I accepted the label “agnostic” for myself. Stage Four is when I announced publicly that I had discarded the “Christian” label, although I still believed in god, and admitted publicly that I was an agnostic.
Stage Five – my final stage – is when I took my agnosticism to its logical conclusion, realizing at that moment that, while I claimed to believe in god, I couldn’t ascribe any quality or attribute to this being or thing I called “god.” I didn’t know what it was I supposedly still believed in. This is when I realized that I am, and have been for a while now - functionally an atheist.
Fear of hell was a major factor in this process. I worked from the basis of inclusivist soteriology, so while I felt the weight of logic pushing me away from faith, my fear of hell (along with other emotional factors, like resistance to change and fear of losing my friends and that sense of community – koinonia – in the Christian Bubble) forced me to hold on to as much of my former life of faith as I could, for as long as I could. That’s why my departure from faith occurred in stages. I hoped – which was purely an emotional reaction – that, if there’s a god, whatever aspects of faith I still had would be enough to “get me in.“ I took Pascal’s Wager not because it made sense, but because it was the only way I found to cope with my persistent doubts.
So that was why it took you so long to de-convert?
Yes. I dealt with both internal and external factors: internal being my looking at myself in the mirror and having to deal with who I was, my fears, and what I believed and didn't believe, and external being my trepidation concerning how my family and friends would react. And I’ll be honest, my mother still doesn’t know, and she doesn’t read my blog. She knows I’m not a minister but that’s as far as it goes.
My whole reaction wasn’t rational. It was totally emotional. Like I said, emotionally I couldn’t go right from Christian to Atheist. Emotionally I had to go one step at a time. This was mostly because of the fear of hell. Eventually my emotions caught up with my rational side, and I realized I had no reason to fear this thing that had been drilled into my mind when I was a child. I finally had the strength and emotional reserve to say I was an agnostic and an atheist and that I don’t have belief in a god.
Even now, once in a while I’ll get a thought in my mind about hell. The fear cultivated in my youth still rears its ugly head. But then I come to my senses, and understand that I’d fear a different hell if I’d grown up in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia! These fears were the result of indoctrination. The fear of hell is like a fear of the dark, it’s nothing tangible, and it’s just a fear that becomes ingrained in your brain through indoctrination when you’re a child by pastors and friends and parents when you don’t have the ability to think about it critically. And you carry that childhood fear into adulthood.
What did you imagine hell to be like?
When I was a child it was more fire and brimstone and weeping and gnashing of teeth. When I was older my view of hell was more sophisticated. I always thought of hell as a place of loss, suffering and emptiness. I saw hell as complete separation from god, and since god is the source of all good, to be in hell is to be devoid of anything good. As I got older my theology of hell was such that I didn’t want to ascribe a literal description to it. When I was a minister I told my congregation that the descriptions of hell in the Bible could be literal or they could be metaphorical. Literal or not, I always thought hell was a bad place and I didn’t want to go there. This almost made the fear worse because now hell was an unknown to me, a metaphysical "dark alley" I never wanted to enter.
