I appreciate that you tried to be nice and polite in your reply to my article. And open minded. You could have written mean things in reply to me.

I generally try to reply to people with the same energy they give me, so if you are polite, I want to be polite in response.

First of all, it matters when people tell me I’m going to hell all the time because it’s mean. I know you thought you had tricked me there. A lot of Christians think everyone else is secretly, deep down inside a Christian (I’ve written about this multiple times) and yet you guys also believe God sends people to hell (which is disturbing to me to have both these beliefs at the same time), but I don’t secretly believe in hell.

Whether you like this or not, your belief that I will suffer for eternity is a cruel belief. It also makes your God sound vicious, petty, and horrible.

For a Christian, your reply was very nice, but I only felt that way because I know very well how Christians think. Many atheists would find your reply hostile because you say things to me like that I live a “LIFE OF DEATH.”

Understand that even though I am critical of God and Christianity, I never say anyone deserves to suffer for eternity or even for life or that they live a “life of death.”

These are threats you are giving to me. The supposed good news of the gospel is always: Do this or else!

If I ran up to people and said that I had something fantastic to tell them and that this fantastic thing was that they either had to do as I say or suffer forever, they’d say I was a mean person, but for some reason Christians get a pass on this? And their message is supposed to be loving?

Your message is not loving. Your message is that God believes that we are so despicable and disgusting that he wouldn’t think twice about throwing us into eternal flames where we will suffer forever. He could just not hold a grudge against us, but he hates us so much that he’d only be appeased by the suffering of an innocent person—Jesus. And because Jesus was excruciatingly tortured to appease his bloodlust, he will let us go to heaven with him, just barely, but only because he’s a narcissist who needs people to worship him and dote on him all the time and say they are inferior to him and pathetic. And then and only then, if you say everything about yourself is garbage and that you’ll never be worthy of even looking at him will he begrudgingly let you stick around and compliment him all the time and make your entire life revolve around him.

And then you call that love. It doesn’t sound like love to me.

Now, you don’t have to agree with me on any of that. I already know you’re not going to.

I accept that religion exists to some degree and that it may help some people in certain ways and that maybe even religion for you might be fantastic and beneficial, but I write all this to explain to you why other people might see you preaching about salvation as hateful because you don’t seem to get why people think you telling them that they might go to hell sounds mean.

None of this will convert you to atheism, it’s just meant to show what your words sound like to us.

I’ve also already been a Christian before. I was raised in the church and prayed the prayer when I was eight years old. I was baptized twice and read the Bible through many times. I was abused very badly using the religion and saw some horrible things and eventually it led to me leaving it all behind, so it’s very unlikely I will ever go back.

But I’m okay with you using my words and arguments to become stronger in your faith, as long as you don’t insult me. That’s my point.

If you guys are right and I am wrong, then my words can’t lead you away from God. My questioning will only make your religion stronger.

I know you think Christians can hold each other accountable and I encourage you to make sure they do that because I’d probably still be a Christian today if they had, but my experience has been with seeing so much bias in the religion and coddling of abusive people that they rarely do and that they need other people from the outside confronting this, at least a little, so Christianity stops being a safe haven for abusers.

Even if I was always destined to become an atheist, I would be much less critical of the religion if my experience wasn’t what it was.

And not only that, but when I shared with Christians the abuse I suffered, I was called a liar and that further drove me away from the church. It’s driving a lot of people away.

And that’s why I don’t think the church is capable of being critical of itself.