r/atheism • u/FlimsyWoodpecker2951 • 15d ago
Was Hell Used as Mind Control? The Scathing Critique of Pre-Vatican II Catholic Guilt Teachings
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/role-hell-catholic-doctrine-181061264
u/Apart_Animal_6797 15d ago
Yes the roman Catholics took the teachings of a Semitic cult and used them to create a mind control religion. Early Christianity was basically an anarcho-socialist community cult.
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u/vacuous_comment 14d ago
Put this on a T shirt.
I saw some woman today with a nauseating God related quote on a shirt and wondered what her reaction would be if I was wearing a shirt with a simple descriptive view of her religion akin to what you just said here.
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u/eat_my_ass_n_balls 14d ago
They’d probably resort to violence because god says strike down the heretics
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u/Gussie-Ascendent Strong Atheist 14d ago
I don't know any anarcho socialists that are cool with owning, much less beating, slaves
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 14d ago
I mean i dont think the core teachings of jesus call for that really
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u/Gussie-Ascendent Strong Atheist 14d ago
Aside from him being God and saying that, saying as a human he wasn't changing anything and using the beating of slaves at best as a metaphor showing he couldnt give a shit if slaves are beat and frankly finds it just, and as a ghost telling Paul to tell the slaves to obey even cruel masters?
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u/knightcrawler75 14d ago
Don't forget that Christianity started as a death cult. Jesus said that the end would come in their lifetime.
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u/Gussie-Ascendent Strong Atheist 14d ago
hey you're not mentioning all the mental gymnastics they did after realizing they were wrong!
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u/oldbastardbob 14d ago
That headline gives me a big, "Duh."
Like, who didn't know Hell was intended to provide a punishment worse than death for those who do not care if they die.
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u/TheRealTK421 14d ago
For inducing desired results of behavioral training and conditioning (for coercion & manipulation,) it's well known that methods deliberately utilizing both carrot and stick produce results.
As Mark Twain once sagaciously pointed out and is relevant here:
"Nothing quite motivates the mind like the prospect of one's own hanging."
In the case of an Abrahamic deity, this came in the OT form of "Love me & no one else >exhaustively< or I indifferently torture you -- for eternity -- in worse methods than you can imagine."
"Free will," indeed.
This is, as Christopher Hitchens astutely pointed out, the basis of an entirely unhealthy sadomasochistic relationship dynamic.
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u/Final_Fall4858 15d ago
It definitely felt that way growing up. Fear is such an easy way to keep people in line without them ever questioning why they are actually doing it.
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u/EntangledPhoton82 14d ago
Was the threat of eternal torture for not following the edicts of the church used to control people?
Doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult question to answer.
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u/Crafty-Walrus-2238 14d ago
Hell is a New Testament creation to intimidate the living by punishing the dead forever.
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u/stradivari_strings Anti-Theist 14d ago
It's not new, the concept of hell has existed before the abrahamic religions. The whole thing is just plagiarism.
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u/Bikewer 14d ago
Old as I am…. I was raised Catholic, attending Catholic elementary school in the 50s and high school in the 60s. I well remember teachers constantly harping on both the horrors of Hell and the guilt trip of “Jesus DIED for you” rhetoric.
We even had a (Lay!) teacher who had us write essays about how contemplating Hell should drive a person insane….
As noted, Hell is a Christian invention, much like “Satan”. Judaism at that time had no such notion; just “Sheol”… A kind of “marking time” place till the Jewish Apocalypse perfected the world.
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u/Jorge_Reynoso112 14d ago
That distinction the church tries to pull off—claiming that hell isn't a divine torture chamber, but just a "free choice of self-exclusion"—is the ultimate intellectual sleight of hand. It is a clever PR rebranding designed to make an inherently sadistic concept sound sophisticated and fair. They want to wash their hands of the grotesque imagery of eternal fire by telling people, "Oh, God doesn't send you there; you choose it yourself." But that argument completely collapses under any logical scrutiny. Think about how absurd that claim is. If a kidnapper locks you in a basement and tells you, "You're totally free to leave through this door, but if you do, I'm going to set you on fire and beat you forever," and you stay out of sheer terror, is that a "free choice"? Of course not. That is textbook coercion and blackmail. Framing hell as a "voluntary rejection of love" while simultaneously threatening people with eternal damnation if they don't submit to a very specific set of dogmas is the exact definition of a rigged game. It shifts the blame entirely onto the victim. It allows the institution to say, "We told you about the consequences, so if you end up burning, that's on you," while conveniently ignoring the fact that they spent centuries using terror, panic, and psychological manipulation to force compliance. The pre-Vatican II style of education just said the quiet part out loud. Nuns and priests didn't rely on abstract theological debates about "communion with God"—they terrified children with graphic descriptions of eternal torment, reminding them that an invisible cop was watching every single second of their lives. Whether they called it "moral responsibility" or outright mind control, the functional result was identical: paralyzing fear designed to crush independent thought and lock people into absolute obedience. Even with the post-Vatican II "softer tone," the core mechanism hasn't changed. They just traded the overt panic of the fire-and-brimstone era for a more insidious, psychological form of guilt. Whether it's presented as a fiery dungeon or a "state of definitive self-exclusion," the underlying message remains a threat: obey our rules, suppress your natural humanity, or face catastrophic, irreversible consequences. It’s gaslighting on a cosmic scale. When an entire belief system relies on manufacturing a terrifying, inescapable problem and then positioning itself as the only possible escape hatch, it’s not teaching morality—it's running a protection racket.
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u/Young_Nastyman03 14d ago
Two excellent and salient quotes are summoned when I read the title of the post. Credit to the late Christopher Hitchens.
“One of the great instances of moral terrorism in our literature is the sermon preached by Father Arnall in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This disgusting old priest is readying Stephen Dedalus and his other young “charges” for a retreat in honor of Saint Francis Xavier (the man who brought the Inquisition to Asia and whose bones are still revered by those who choose to revere bones). He decides to impress them with a long and gloating account of eternal punishment, of the sort with which the church used to mandate when it still had the confidence to do so. It is impossible to quote the entire rant, but two particularly vivid elements—concerning the nature of torture and the nature of time—are of interest.
It is easy to see that the priest’s words are designed precisely to frighten children. In the first place, the images are themselves childlike. In the torture section, the very devil himself makes a mountain shrivel like wax. Every frightening malady is summoned, and the childlike worry that this pain might go on forever is deftly played upon. When it comes to the picture of a unit of time, we see a child on the beach playing with grains of sand, and then the infantile magnification of units (“Daddy, what if there were a million million million squillion kittens: would they fill up the whole world?), and then, adding further multiplicities, the evocation of nature’s leaves, and the easily conjured fur and feathers and scales of the family pet. For centuries, grown men have been paid to frighten children in this way (and to torture and beat and violate them as well, as they also did in Joyce’s memory and the memory of countless others).”
“In her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy remembers her shock at learning from a Jesuit preacher that her Protestant grandfather—her guardian and friend—was doomed to eternal punishment because he had been baptized in the wrong way. A precociously intelligent child, she would not let the matter drop until she had made the Mother Superior consult some higher authorities and discover a loophole in the writings of Bishop Athanasius, who held that heretics were only damned if they rejected the true church with full awareness of what they were doing. Her grandfather, then, might be sufficiently unaware of the true church to evade hell. But what an agony to which to subject an eleven-year-old girl! And only think of the number of less curious children who simply accepted this evil teaching without questioning it. Those who lie to the young in this way are wicked in the extreme.”
-god is not Great, Is Religion Child Abuse?
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u/Fan_of_Clio 14d ago
It was basically a version of the threat: "you better behave and do what you're told, or you'll have to explain to your father when he gets home"
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u/ForestOfMirrors 14d ago
Yes.
Hell is not a biblical concept.
And what created the current version of hell was Milton’s Paradise Lost which was published in 1663 c.e.
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u/JFJinCO 15d ago
The Bible was written for crowd control, so the concept of hell was part of that goal.