The miracle of Religion is how it blinds "believers" from accepting responsibility for the suffering they alone are responsible for. They do this by passing off the responsibility for that suffering to their "God," while blaming the victims who are forced to suffer under the yoke of that delusion for bringing it upon themselves, through their own free will. Note the epitome of hypocrisy in doing this: for the victims suffer because they freely chose not to believe in a particular brand of "God," of which there are thousands, while the perpetrators who inflict that suffering have no other choice but to do so, according to them, because they are too terrified to consider they could ever be wrong; because they are too terrified to consider that life is only precious because it is finite, and ends at the coffin door.
However much "believers" wish and work to deny this simple infallible truth, religion produces far more suffering and damage in the world - both emotional and psychological, both individually and collectively - than any other force in history. That suffering affects both believers and non-believers alike, one from within and the other from without.
"Believers" who often hope to alleviate or at least dull their fear that death is every living things final reward for being born, are forced to "work out their salvation in fear and trembling," as it says in Philippians 2:12. This means they must continually strive to live up to an infinite ideal personified as Jesus Christ, that is as impossible to reach as it is to even comprehend, like a single integer condemned to forever measuring it's worth by comparing itself to infinity. The Sisyphean task of pursuing this impossible standard is "intelligently designed" by the purveyors of religion by teaching people to live "in fear and trembling" that if they do not, they will die. But for the "believer," death is not simply an eternal dreamless sleep, but an eternal heavenly pig roast, where they are the main course.
The result of this, however, is that that person can still reach their death bed, and rather than be comforted in their final hours there, be tormented emotionally and psychologically only all the more, struck with "fear and trembling" that they had possibly failed to live up to the standard that would save them from the fires of hell. This level of hidden cruelty and deception, for which the "believer" takes no responsibility whatsoever, is on par with the sexual abuse that the Catholic Church denied and thus facilitated over the course of decades. The difference is, this abuse has lasted since the founding of Christianity began, and not a single Christian takes a single shred of reprehensibility for it, passing that responsibility instead onto their imaginary friend as "his divine will," and all of the victims of this mass delusion. And the only way to make it stop hurting, so they advise, is to love the torturer as He commands - or it will only get worse when you die.
My father was a devout Catholic, and I loved him with all my heart. But when he came to the final days of his life as cancer ate him from the inside out, he told me he was terrified. I have no idea of what he was terrified of exactly, because he never elaborated. It may have been just the process of dying itself that he was talking about, and though I am an atheist myself, I hoped his life long devotion to his religion had, at the very least, served to ease his mind as death approached. But I also know that anyone who is as convinced of the validity of the Bible as I used to be growing up, because the fear of hell scared me more than anything ever before, may very well be only all the more tormented and terrified by the prospect of death, even though death is as natural a part of life as being born. And we should strive to make both as beautiful as we can.
Life is scary enough already. People do not need fear of eternal torture for failing to love their eternal torturer to make them more moral or at peace. The child of a torturer who loves that torturer will only become a torturer. Homo sapiens should demand a far better father figure than one who murders his only son to forgive humanity for eating an apple out of a childlike curiosity. Especially when Jesus claims we can only enter the kingdom of heaven by being like children. Hell, that's exactly what Adam & Eve were doing in the first place!
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