That you are, from birth, a dirty sinful creature who should beg forgiveness for even existing. That fucks up kids, man. That instead of loving and accepting who you are at your core you should be ashamed of it and beg forgiveness. That an invisible man in the sky loves you but if you displease him you will burn in fire for eternity.

Religion is fucked up

I was married to a man for 12 years who was Church of Christ which I now consider a cult, looking back. We were in church three times a week, even with my job and two kids to help with homework and cook for every night. No matter what I did in the church sector, it was never good enough, it was full of hypocrites and I was gossiped about when an elderly married man hugged me every time he saw me. Whenever I had questions about anything, I was told somewhat arrogantly "because that's what it says in the bible". I was looked down on for having too many questions! So the ending to my story is, I got divorced, and organized religion has left a sour taste in my mouth ever since. Their purpose is to put people down and make them feel insignificant so they can gain control of your life by labeling you as a "sinner".

It has fucked over the Republican party to the point I can't even have a dialogue with my father. I yearn for the days when we could debate things like inflation and interest rates and whether or not we should have price fixing on milk and gasoline.

GUILT!

Teachings of the catholic church to children (especially about sex) are designed to produce feelings of guilt

It wasted many valuable moments of my life.

When previously religious, I recall always being made to feel guilty, even for benign things. To live in such a bubble. But again, I wasn't a very good Catholic, so once living on my own, realizing prayer, church, none of that mattered, but action, accountability, real world responsibility, that is what created change for good or bad.

Fear, guilt, and sexual repression.

Getting over the fear of eternal damnation

Fear of hell. I have anxiety and OCD, and my brain likes to envision ways of being tortured for eternity. Fun stuff.

I was kicked out of church at age 5 or six. But, I was stabbed by a christian extremist kid in 7th grade with a pencil that he broke between my ribs. When he found out that I was an atheist, he thought that he was responsible to try to push it into my heart to save Jesus. Luckily the pencil broke. He was not punished because the principal believed my saying that I don't believe in god warranted him to try to kill me. My parents did not do anything because they did not want to draw community attention to the fact that I was an embarassing atheist. I was also denied getting into the advanced science and math classes since I lacked morals. This was a public school in Waterloo Iowa, not a catholic school.

In addition to guilt as others mentioned here, I think being told to have faith is detrimental. Faith is believing in something regardless of evidence or even in spite of evidence to the contrary. Faith is what children use to believe Santa Claus exists. As adults, we are told this same method should be used to believe a god exists. Faith teaches us to be illogical. Religion is anti-intellectual.

The most negative thing, and the thing I fear most, is the aggressive and intrusive way that the evangelicals are moxing religion and politics and how it is trying to force its dogma onto us with the force of bad law.

It placed my friends so far behind me I doubt most will ever catch up...

Taught me to hate others because they were different. We were "superior" because we knew the truth lol how cocky! After i broke free from the indoctrination, it pains me to see people think and behave that way because now i REALLY see how sad, wrong and embarrassing it is

This stupid belief that homosexuality is 'sinful.'

I would say, setting unrealistic expectations and hobbling my ability to assess reality.

These religious people are very judgemental think they're better than everybody

Oh Christ where to even start lol I don’t think I can pick just one but it all kinda boils down to miseducation. A severely repressive sex “education” full of a lot of shame to work out, and holding me back in my education in general. So much science and history I had to re-educate myself in when I switched to a decent public school my sophomore year (and still in the process of educating myself on things I missed at 31). Teaching me to be a hoper and not a do-er. That’s a big one. I’ve done a lot of work to turn those habits around but they still hold me back in some way or another.

Spent 30 years in an Asian cult, have no savings.

It made me believe in magical thinking, or that magic or superpowers exist. In other words, it made me unable to see reality correctly from a very young age and it had to be learned the hard way through trial and error. My mother could have spared me that hardship and gave me a better start at life had she kept her religion to herself.

I think the patriarchal mythos - where the father is always right - women and children are property for the pleasure of the men controlling them - that's what affected my poor self esteem growing up. It fostered my inability to get help from my mother or other adults who could clearly see the abuse us kids were going through at the hand of our father, who ruled with an iron fist.

I think getting back to an egalitarian society will be inevitable at some point, with the #metoo movement, and so on, creating awareness about powerful men taking advantage of women and children.

The idea that your religion is the only true religion. The idea that you cannot marry outside your religion. And probably most destructive of all is you must kill anyone who doesn't believe what you are told you must believe. War!

It was not good at first. Feeling guilty for masturbating just made me want to do it even more. That was probably one of the factors that made me an atheist. Then of course there was the phase when I became an anti-theist. That didn't help my relationships living in a conservative country. But, I'm over those things. Life goes on, you know.

Telling you that there is an afterlife (which I can't prove or disprove). The thought that Santa was real. Onward Christian Soldiers, fight the good fight, etc.

I was at a religious boarding school in my early teens. They gathered us all together and told us the usual tale that Christians were going to be persecuted and have to go live in caves and probably be killed by nonbelievers, etc. etc. Only they got everybody pumped up emotionally by insisting that it was going to happen any moment, like tomorrow or next week. That they would have to be tortured and die for their faith if they wanted to get to heaven, and that many of us would never live through the "troubled times" coming. Once they had the crowd whipped into a weeping, terrified frenzy, they then had a "call" for anybody who needed to be saved and/or baptized to come to the front. The sight of those hysterical, weeping teens all running to the front of the room will always be with me; and I knew clearly at the time that I was witnessing some very sadistic emotional child abuse. I also knew that our parents would all heartily approve of it, being the Christians who sent us there.

Fast forward 40 years and my mother is visiting me and attends a church here of that same faith. She didn't enjoy it because she said their Pastor was encouraging them all to keep a packed suitcase in the trunk of their car because - you guessed it - any minute now the persecution would begin and they'd all have to live in caves. Some things never change, but why the hell people spend their whole lives believing "any minute now" is beyond me. And when you point out to them that its never happened yet, and might never, after all, they get really mad.

I notice politics are a lot like religion - 8 years of Obama "coming to get my guns" and I still have every one of 'em. Hmmm.