Not sure what your point is here. Hell was a retributive device if you WERE Christian.

With regard to life in general it has always been hard. Nothing to do with religion.

It’s not difficult to believe at all. The great delusion here is that free thinking exists. This may be so but free action does not. You are restricted by the social contract whether ethically or legally.

Your operable choices are frequently either/or not multiple if you wish to retain your place in society.

Sadly, we are not free.
We are slaves to our devices and their brainwashing, while we are simultaneously being spied on with every tap of a key.

Free thought, and free speech, are recent phenomenon. And currently, only in the United States. And even here it is being attacked by those who should be praising it.

The assault upon Western Civilization has been propagated by the EU's insistence on unlimited immigration of people who are determined to bring their ignorance to Europe, an invasion of islam's army of crusaders of repression.

This is happening in Canada, and Australia,....

In Nigera, in december, muslims beheaded 12 christians. And, they held an auction to sell some of the girls they had stolen.

There is NOTHING American about islam. There is nothing liberating about islam. Islam is darkness.

35,000+ attacks since 911. The religion of pieces is not interested in enlightenment.

"The truth of the matter is that hell was a real thing to people up until probrably 50 years ago."
FALSE
It is that way for a great many people today, complete with demons fallen angels and all of it. There are conservative areas of all christendom which still teach that way today, and those very sects also adhere to strict childhood indoctrination.

So a lot of people are raised with an utterly irrational, illogical, implausible notion of Hell, which nonetheless FEELS real to them. Like a form of PTSD.

"People were burned at the stake, beheaded, drawn and quartered , run out of town and shunned if they didn’t tow the religious line."
I suggest you take a hard look at rural areas of Africa and Asia if you think that is all bygone, its not. thankfully it is no longer common or even prevalent in most places. And that last bit "run out of town and shunned if they didn’t tow the religious line." we have right here in the states in many forms, from forms of Mormonisim, the the Amish and the Jehovah's witnesses to name a few (thats likely millions).

YOU indeed seem fortunate, I had to reason my way out and overcome irrational thoughts about it for a decade at least, 35 years ago . . .
It is still going on and why we need recoveryfromreligion.org

all of that can still exist today to some extent...there is always the ability for propaganda to infect the minds of the masses and for unchecked power to arise and be used on those who do not conform to the powerful. this can happen in any country

people are still burned at the statek beheaded, run out of town and shunned. a certain wapo journalist was cut up a lot worse that into quarters pretty recently. and even back in the day, people could think freely. they just could not express their thoughts freely, and even in the united states, there are awful consequences sometimes for doing so. there is more information available to us than before, but there is also more misinformation. maybe we're lucky and maybe we're not, but we cannot say that today we may think more freely than before.

g

p.s. we are unfree in other ways, too, with consequences sufficiently dire. look up how many trans people are murdered every year for being trans. that's not about thinking freely but it's about freely being who one is. it's related.

It's far easier to enforce a negative than a positive. Especially when the negative out weighs the positive. If you don't learn from the past you'll more than likely repeat the past, so, telling people to forget the past is stupid.

Religious fantasy and humanity's horrific behaviour aside, we are all unimaginably lucky to be here at all.
Among other improbabilties, what were the chances that your parents got together (and had that extra glass of wine that night) and their parents, and their parents and so on down through time?

I think it was Bill the Cat of the Bloom County comic that would sometimes fall into a numb stupor thinking about the wonder of it all.

Rather than complaining about people's past ignorance and misbehavior (however extreme) we should work to positively use the outrageous gifts we've been given.
Do good things.

I love where you are going with this; but, we have always lived in a time in that we can think freely. Expressing those thoughts could make anyone a target. That being said, I feared year 2000 when I was a child in my guardians fundamentalist homes. Everyone would say that the world reached 1000 years old but there is no way that we will survive unitl 2000. They believed that Christ would return and all of John's visions from Revelations would take place. ... Never minding that our earth is exactly 4.543 billion years.

All religions suck at these lack of principles, people were linched and hanged in trees up to the 60s by christians, christians jailed muslims in Kosovo, Hindus are slaughtering muslims in India, we all know what muslims do to others. Chinese buddhists also slaughtering muslims in China. All religions are the same in criminality and happening right now.

The only reason Christianity "has gotten better lately" is because for us here in first world countries it's not politically in control anymore. Give the church its power back and we'll see just how sweet and accepting it is.

Are you fukin' kidding me! Why are you willing to debate the issue? Consider this; belief without evidence is religion.

I hear your every word. My childhood religious friend still thinks that I am "angry with god" and he believes I am going to hell if I do not change my ways. Meanwhile, he wants desperately to be a little spark sitting around the feet of god who is the big spark. Back when we were both 13 he would think his god was a bearded old man in the sky.

Science is about the search for truth and knowledge, supported by evidence. Technology is about profiting from that science.

The two are not necessarily sympathetic to one another. Science when done correctly demands adherence to exacting strictures and tenets. Technology demands adherence to market share and profits with varying degrees of scientific methodology.

In that sense, we are at least a half century behind western Europe.

I have to admire the Freethinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries (the golden era). They through out religion before scientific answers to basic questions of the world. People like Thomas Pain. Charles Darwin, Galileo,Isaac Newton. They went against the church before there were answers

Yes, and many christians don't even believe their own religion. There still there for the right to bully others.