“My overdosing on religion was becoming a serious problem”

It’s a problem for the world as well

When Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011, a volcano of Christian hate erupted. Devout folks who’d never heard of him suddenly found out that he’d written a book (2009) titled, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. They spewed rage and invective on social media, savoring the idea that Hitchens was suffering—and would suffer forever—in the fires of hell. “Love your enemy” (Jesus-script, Matthew 5:44) has probably rarely been so widely ignored. Ironically, their fury probably drove sales of the book—which even now, fourteen years later, has a high Amazon sales ranking. 

 

It is my suspicion that most of these outraged folks are also unaware of the extensive role religion has played in poisoning the human experience. The gospel of John fueled anti-Semitism, no doubt inspiring Martin Luther’s murderous rage against the Jews, which in turn helped provide the Nazi rationale for the Holocaust. The Crusades were religion-motivated wars. Slavery was easily championed by good Christians who took their Bibles seriously. Our democracy is in jeopardy because obsessive-compulsive believers want to impose their understanding of god on everyone. The evidence of religious poison is on the news every day.

 

 

And notice this as well. Just as “love your enemy” was ignored, religious fervor stoked rage, at the same time that it has suppressed curiosity. What percentage of those enraged believers paused to consider what Hitchens meant by those two claims in his title?

God Is Not Great and 

How Religion Poisons Everything 

 

Yes, the poison has manifested in such major killing events as the crusades and slavery, but the poison infects individual human minds, stimulating rage, blunting curiosity. Not too long ago, a devout Catholic woman told me that the priests and nuns had told them not to think about what they learned in catechism. Protestants can claim no superiority in this regard. Churches do not thrive on curiosity and skepticism. 

 

When parents are fully committed to this close-minded approach to religion, the poison is sometimes administered full strength. I recently came across an article, written in 2016 by Josiah Hesse, titled Apocalyptic Upbringing: How I Recovered from My Terrifying Evangelical Childhood.

 

He opens with an account of his retreat to the basement—he was ten years old—during a terrifying storm. Awareness of his sin was uppermost in his mind: “My parents were home late and my first thought was that they’d been raptured up to heaven. I was a sinner who had been left behind to face the Earth’s destruction.” 

“Thunder boomed as I opened my Bible to the Book of Revelation, a passage I knew well after years spent on my dad’s knee as he read it aloud to his kids…I would have to hide from the antichrist, who would force all those left on Earth to renounce Christ and receive the mark of the beast on their right hand or forehead. Anyone found with the beast’s mark after death would be thrown into the lake of fire.”

Is there any better example of religious poison? Richard Carrier has described the book of Revelation as “a veritable acid trip, an extended hallucination of the bizarrest kind, an example of the kind of thing going on all the time in the early churches…” (p. 136, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt). There is such a feast of bad theology in the Bible, with the book of Revelation ranking pretty high in that category. It’s no surprise that some denominations choose to focus on these sick texts. Nor is it a surprise that parents who have been groomed to teach such religion to their children are actually guilty of abuse. 

I was raised by a very devout mother who, even so, had a high quotient of common sense. Thus I never suffered the way Josiah Hesse did:

 

“…my childhood was filled with more biblical prophecy than Sesame Street good times. The urgency of avoiding hell surpassed any trivial education the world had to offer. After all, if you’re staring down the barrel of eternal torment, who has the time for algebra?

“Salvation was attached to belief, and in order to protect my belief I had to censor my thoughts. The book of Mark says that ‘whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.’ So I was careful to never even think a thought that could be considered blasphemous. This was profoundly exhausting; and while I was mostly successful at repressing my intellectual curiosity during the day, once sleep came I lost all security clearance to my own mind.

“My dreams were terrorized by a wide-eyed witch who worked for the devil.”

 

Hesse was born in 1982, so he was a teenager as the year 2,000 drew near. 

“As 2000 approached, my panic attacks grew more severe. I pondered the nature of eternity nearly every minute of the day. Whether torture or paradise, the concept itself filled me with existential dread. Eternity. As in, forever. And ever. And then more. And more. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.” 

From his adult perspective now—yes, there’s a mostly happy ending—he saw that “…my overdosing on religion was becoming a serious problem.”

Eventually curiosity kicked in, at least at the level of trying to find outside verification for the Bible. He even read works by “those who despised Christianity’—and this included Christopher Hitchens, whose severe critique of religion is hard to refute. So Hesse was one of those Christians who gave curiosity as much space as rage. And he finally snapped out of it:

“Then one evening in San Francisco in 2006, while watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, I quietly said to myself: ‘I don’t think God exists.’ My breath stopped. Cold sweat raced down my back. I winced, half expecting to have a heart attack. Or a giant beast to rise from the water. But nothing happened. The world kept turning…My entire life I’d been holding my breath, anticipating a scene of mind-shattering horror that simply never arrived.”

Looking back, Hesse is generous in his assessment of his parents. “…little of the blame belongs on my parents’ shoulders. They were young, idealistic Christians when they had me, and like so many religious parents, only had the best of intentions of rearing me in their faith.” And had little understanding of how much damage can be caused by religious fervor. “I asked my dad if he’d known about the intense anxiety I’d suffered throughout my childhood. ‘I knew you were afraid. You were such a scared little boy. I didn’t know what to do.’”

Not knowing what to do can be expected when the devout are discouraged from thinking about what they’ve been taught by clergy and parents. They are sheltered from the wide world of ideas and knowledge outside the narrow religious mindset (they could learn, for example, that the book of Revelation shouldn’t be taught to children). Sometimes the abused kids descend into fear—as Josiah Hesse describes his situation. But in other cases, the result is rage, radicalization, and terrorism. Christopher Hitchens, referring to the 9/11 attacks, notes: 

“The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how ‘people of faith’ possess moral advantages that others can only envy” (p. 32, God Is Not Great). 

Nor do the people of faith possess advantages in the realm of ideas, in their understanding of how the world works. They usually are bound to ancient superstitions—and Christianity is quite a bundle of them. But this is the case for religions in general, as Hitchens states so persuasively:

“How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Azteks had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? …How many needless assumptions must be made, how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to ‘fit’ with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities?”  (p. 7, God Is Not Great)

Billions of humans still overdose on religion, and thus remain unaware of what science has discovered about the world, and how the cosmos works. These discoveries provide far more awe and wonder than ancient superstitions and magical thinking ever could. But the awe and wonder delivered by science can be too scary, and prompts many to cling to religious fantasies construed as reality. “Our place in the cosmos,” Hitchens notes, “is so unimaginably small that we cannot,

with our miserly endowment of cranial matter, contemplate it for long at all” (p. 91, God Is Not Great).  

Earlier I noted that, for Josiah Hesse, it was mostly a happy ending. By which I mean that he did manage to put god-belief behind him. But, as of 2016 when he wrote the article, he was still plagued by horrible nightmares. However, he has made his way as a journalist and writer. This is his website, and a link to a recent podcast interview. 

He has moved beyond overdosing on religion—and is a much better, happier person because he managed to do it. He can still be haunted by the frightful apocalyptic imagery of his youth:

“Then I take a deep breath, reminding the frightened child inside me that he is safe, that the world may be full of uncertainty and pain and confusion, but we are here, now, and there are no locusts with the heads of lions likely to come out of the Earth any time soon.”

 

 

 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

 

His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

 

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.