Addressing 7 Christian Comments to My “Only An Evil God Curses” Video | They All Fail!

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]My recent video, Only an Evil God Curses, Had God Not Cursed Us, Jesus Wouldn't Be Necessary, got a bit of traction and with traction comes lots of comments, many of which were from Christians objecting to my arguments and putting me in my place or trying to. And today we're going to look at how they did and see if there's, I don't know, anything new we can learn from their comments. I always enjoy doing these types of videos because these comments, they they really do make me think and wrestle with concepts. They help to sharpen my focus and arguments. So, keep them coming. And I also like doing them because maybe you're suffering from religious trauma or just doubt and confusion in general. Maybe you're holding some cognitive dissonance and and when you hear these types of criticisms directly from Christians or maybe you read them online or on other videos and posts, they get to you. They make you feel worse about yourself because you're doubting or struggling.

[00:00:58]They they make you question your own intuition and understanding. And if we're being honest, the worst reaction you might have is, uh, what if they're right? Well, they're not. But down you go into the abyss crashing into a wall of anxiety and despondency and the vicious trauma cycle continues. So, I've picked seven comments, nice biblical number, to respond to today and hopefully I can give you some ways to think about them that can be helpful so you can avoid that destructive crash and maintain your footing. And maybe even better, spot the flaws and fallacies in these comments so that you can heal. So, let's get into it. But first, I'm HG Roberts, author of On Monsters and Phantoms and my focus is on the mental and emotional harm that Christianity causes and how it makes us think worse about ourselves and the world around us. I hold a master's degree in mass communication, so I'm specifically interested in the messages that the Bible communicates to us today as well as how we interpret those messages through the cognitive filters in our minds. I deconverted from Christianity after 25 years because of severe religious trauma. Many of those years I spent as part of a worship team and leading a music ministry. Here's our first comment and if you haven't watched the original video, it's linked below, but these comments will make more sense if you do watch it. So, you think God was obligated to keep our lives luxurious and stress, sadness, and evil free after deliberately disobeying his one and only rule he made?

[00:02:30]I don't know that God was obligated to do anything. To suggest he's obligated to do something maybe means he answers to a higher moral code than himself, which violates the Christian definition of objective morality given from an objective lawgiver God. But let's flip this around. Was God obligated to curse and punish because Adam and Eve disobeyed? And again, Christians keep assuming Adam and Eve understood what it would mean to disobey apart from having the knowledge of good and evil. Despite me covering that point in the video, Christians still don't seem to understand that God held Adam and Eve to a moral standard without either of them having the wisdom to apprehend and apply that moral standard prior to eating the fruit. So, again, because Adam and Eve disobeyed, was God obligated to curse things? Notice I didn't say discipline or correct, but curse. That's the material point here. A supposedly moral and loving God who says he wants what's best for us, that his plans are not to harm us, but to prosper us and give us a future according to Jeremiah 29, Christians believe, and this God always does what's right, well, then I think this God would be obligated to forgive rather than curse. Obligated not because he's bound by some external moral code that he's subject to and that requires forgiveness in a case like this, but rather because forgiveness and mercy are in his nature according to Christians.

[00:03:59]If this God is morally self-obligated to abide by and follow his own intrinsic nature from which all morality, love, and goodness supposedly flows, and that nature Christians claim is one of forgiveness, grace, and abounding in mercy, then I would expect this God not to curse, no matter our disobedience.

[00:04:17]Should our disobedience force God to act outside of his own nature? Why? Can he?

[00:04:22]Where is the threat to God because of our disobedience? Well, HG, perfect and righteous judgment and wrath are also in his nature. Well, I'm glad you said that. What this then tells me is that if God is both perfectly and objectively merciful and wrathful, the problem is that his wrath by choice often wins out over his mercy and forgiveness and that's sadistic. That's an evil God. So, what, HG, he should never punish disobedience? Well, I never said that. I would say he should never curse us because of it and Genesis isn't the only place he curses because of disobedience.

[00:04:55]Read Deuteronomy 28 as just one other place where he's cursing the hell out of mankind and the earth. Here is something you won't hear in Sunday school or your church service or in your favorite Bible study. Long before Yahweh emerged in the ancient Near East, many cultures already believed their gods could curse individuals, cities, or entire peoples.

[00:05:19]The idea of divine cursing was widespread and deeply embedded in early religion. Gods like Enlil, Ishtar, and Marduk sent famine, disease, or destruction as punishments. Kings even inscribed curses on monuments warning that anyone who defaced them would be struck down by the gods. Entire mythological stories like floods or plagues were often thought of as divine punishment, as curses. Egyptian deities such as Sekhmet unleashed destruction when defied. Tombs sometimes carried written curses meant to punish grave robbers invoking the wrath of the gods in the afterlife. Greek gods were famously short-tempered and easily angered. Zeus hurled lightning as punishment. People even created curse tablets called defixiones to call upon the gods to harm enemies. In Canaanite and surrounding cultures, gods like Baal and El were believed to control storms, fertility, and disaster. Blessings and curses were central to how people understood divine favor or divine anger.

[00:06:22]The concept of gods issuing curses wasn't unique or new with Yahweh. It was already a popular feature of ancient religion across multiple civilizations.

[00:06:32]The ancient writers of the Hebrew Bible simply said, you know, we need one of those gods who curses in our narrative as well and he needs to be a badass. It was a common trope. The Bible writers borrowed the cursing God trope just like they borrowed so many other parts of other ancient mythological fiction. I'm certainly not the first to point this out. Here's a good resource if you want to learn more. But getting back to Yahweh, rationally he can't be equal parts wrathful and merciful at the same time, otherwise he'd cancel himself out.

[00:07:03]He'd always be trying to out-wrath and out-mercy himself in every situation.

[00:07:07]He'd be inert and incapable of anything.

[00:07:09]This God then has to pick when to execute mercy and thus withhold his wrath or when to execute wrath and withhold mercy. And that then makes him inconsistent and arbitrary, which is exactly what we see in the Bible. For example, Adam and Eve get God's wrath and curses, which are an even worse level of his wrath, while Satan is shown mercy by being allowed to persist, have dominion over this world, and supernatural access to our hearts and minds. Adam and Eve don't get that power. Satan's given the title in the Bible as the god of this world and the god of this age. Why such lofty honors, God? Why the abundant power and access?

[00:07:49]Adam and Eve get booted out of the garden and get the title of the original sinners even though that title belongs to Satan, well, and God for letting Satan into his perfect garden knowing Satan's intentions. I mean, if you believe the serpent was Satan, which contemporary evangelical Christians do, God was an accomplice and an enabler.

[00:08:09]The other example, and I've brought this up before, is the incongruency between how God deals with Pharaoh and Paul in terms of wrath and mercy. In both cases, we have a leader persecuting God's chosen people. In Pharaoh's case, he was enslaving them. In Paul's case, he was murdering them. Pharaoh got God's wrath and Paul got God's mercy. Inconsistent.

[00:08:33]No, HG, Paul was a Hebrew, so so he got special treatment. It's okay, you can say God favors a specific people group. God cops to that all over the Bible and we'll do a video on why that's a problem and leads to trauma soon.

[00:08:46]Anyway, based on what Christians claim of this God, that he's all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, I would expect this God not to levy what amounts to unfair, unwarranted, and unnecessarily excessive and brutal punishments strictly meant to harm as that's what curses do. I would expect the omnibenevolent God that Christians love to brag about to execute mercy and forgiveness in the case of Adam and Eve, especially knowing God had not yet equipped his only two created humans with the capacity to understand moral consequences. Well, he did show them mercy and forgiveness, HG.

[00:09:24]He clothed them and provided for them, right? Right, right after he cursed them and then banished them from the garden.

[00:09:32]So, I'm assuming this commenter feels God's justified in ensuring that our lives are filled with hardship, catastrophe, stress, sadness, and evil for disobeying. I mean, we deserve it, right? And remember, if God's levying a punishment or curse such that evil is needed to bring about all this hardship and suffering and catastrophe we deserve, then only this sovereign God can ensure evil's existence, perpetuation, and access to us to manipulate and deceive us. I can only hope this commenter is not a parent and never becomes one. I would feel worried for his children if he thinks God is justified for behaving so horribly and immorally to his own uninformed children. And finally, this commenter implies God had made just one simple rule that was broken. I would expect a God of love, mercy, and grace to have made another rule. No crafty serpents or Satan, depending on what you believe, are allowed into my perfect garden to deceive my children. Because as a perfectly moral God, I am obligated through my own intrinsic nature to protect them as I like to claim that my love always protects. I'll never understand how Christians can fawn over and apply all the 1 Corinthians love attributes to this God. One of those attributes being that his love always protects.

[00:10:50]But then he allowed a serpent to deceive his only two children who had not yet been given the wisdom to understand and recognize deception nor good and evil.

[00:11:00]And all the while this God would have known the outcome. A perfect moral God, out of his very nature of love and goodness, would prevent such corruption of the good world he created. I would think he would be morally obligated to do that. Unless he, you know, created us to fail and fall and be overrun with evil, which is what we see. Help me understand why you keep ignoring this question. Explain how you don't see it.

[00:11:28]Okay, this one says, "Good thing you are not God. Sounds like you are stuck in believing you understand God's mind. If you did, he would be a very weak God."

[00:11:39]Well, I think I have a better idea of what's expected from a perfectly moral divine entity than this God does, simply based on the claims he makes about himself and then the way he behaves. And here we enter into the unsolvable dilemma of God claiming we can know him and that he keeps no secrets from us versus him being unknowable and beyond our grasp. Again, the Bible can't make up its mind here. Let's read some contradictory scriptures, shall we?

[00:12:05]Starting with God is knowable and wants to be known. Jeremiah 9:23-24, "Let not the wise boast of their wisdom, but let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me." Deuteronomy 30:11-14, "Now, what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.

[00:12:25]No, the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so you may obey it." Psalm 145:18, "The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth."

[00:12:37]"Now, this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God." Daniel 2:22, "He reveals deep and hidden things." And Amos 3:7, "Surely the sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants, the prophets."

[00:12:51]Now, let's look at the passages where he claims he's unknowable and that his ways are mysterious and beyond human understanding. Isaiah 55:8-9, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways." Romans 11:33-34, "Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out." Job 38:1-4, "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand."

[00:13:27]Ecclesiastes 11:5, "As you do not know the path of the wind, so you cannot understand the work of God, the maker of all things." Deuteronomy 29:29, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us.

[00:13:42]So, we've got this obvious tension. The Bible consistently portrays God as deeply relational, inviting people to know him, to draw near and understand what he requires.

[00:13:53]Well, at the same time insisting that his full nature, decisions, and purposes remain beyond human comprehension. In other words, God is presented as both personally knowable and infinitely unknowable. Close enough for relationship, yet vast enough to defy complete understanding. That's what makes him God, HG. No, that's what makes a melancholic thinker with OCD insane.

[00:14:17]This drove me mad as a Christian. It always made me doubt what I could know and not know in terms of my relationship with God. This is what caused me to lose my trust in him. I love when Christians hide behind the God is mysterious defense. What a cover for anything we don't like or can't rationally explain that shuts down critical thinking.

[00:14:39]Another thing though is that God commands us to test everything to know what is right from wrong or good from evil. Did he mean test everything but him and his commands? I can certainly judge his actions against the claims he makes about himself. I mean, that's right in the book. Do they align? Are they consistent? If not, how moral is it to grant exceptions for yourself while holding your creation accountable? I mean, I thought God can't contradict himself, that he always behaves consistently and predictably. Meaning, if it's objectively moral for us, then it's also objectively moral for God.

[00:15:16]Meaning, God himself is bound by his own edicts and commands. If he commands us to test what is good and reject what is evil, shouldn't he be subject to that test? What I'm trying to say here is that I think it's immoral for God to say testing or questioning his morality via his own actions and behaviors is off-limits. That's a tyrannical dictator ensuring he passes laws that apply to his subjects while protecting himself from scrutiny.

[00:15:45]And why would me knowing and understanding God's mind suddenly make him weak, like this commenter said? Like he's lost some of his divine all-powerfulness because he's allowed me to understand my creator. The one who Christians claim wants and desires to have a personal relationship with me, who pursues me, who wants me to know him so well that I become him. Why would having an intimate connection with my Abba Father, whose spirit supposedly lives inside me to teach me, to imbue me with his wisdom, to guide me? Why would that make him weak? I think gaining an understanding of my creator doesn't weaken him, but rather makes him more approachable, more trustworthy, more lovely, more safe, more comfortable, and less intimidating.

[00:16:33]Why does a strong God have to be a distant and non-understandable God? I don't see how our level of understanding God impacts his strengths and weaknesses, as if his strength or weakness depends on our level of understanding him. Maybe someone can explain what I'm missing. Okay, this one is a bit longer and I'm only going to read the first part. I didn't include the second part here on the screen, but you can find the comment and read the rest if you want. And I will pause and address things as we go.

[00:17:04]The claim in the video that religious trauma uniquely harms children while simultaneously portraying minors as competent enough to navigate made-up gender identity decisions rests on an inconsistent standard and a narrow reading of both theology and psychology.

[00:17:22]Let's stop there. First, religious trauma isn't what uniquely harms children. The Bible causes trauma in children and that's the harm. The Bible itself. The Bible harms, which creates religious trauma. Religious trauma is the outcome of the harm. Just a weird way this commenter phrased things.

[00:17:41]Anyhow, in none of my videos, especially the one this person is reacting to, have I ever said or implied that I think children are capable and should be allowed to navigate made-up identity decisions. I have no idea where this commenter is getting that from. Gender identity is not a topic I've ever deeply addressed, nor do I feel qualified to adequately address it. He built his own straw man so he could try to tear it down. And go back and read that part of the comment. The two ideas, they don't connect. A child suffering from religious trauma because of the Bible has no bearing on whether that child has the mental capacity to make decisions, whether about gender identity or anything else. And for the record, I would advocate for parents or caregivers to be involved with their children when confronting gender identity issues.

[00:18:34]Okay.

[00:18:35]Back to the comment. From a theological perspective, what is often labeled religious trauma is better understood as a misapplication of religion, not an inherent feature of it. Wrong. Simply wrong. And I get this a lot, that my religious trauma is the result of some bad apples in the church. Maybe I was exposed to false teachers. Maybe I fell victim to some errant teachings. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time such that religion was misapplied to me, despite me praying daily for God to protect me from that very thing and to always put me in the path of right teaching. And let's read the working definition of religious trauma.

[00:19:14]Religious trauma results from an event, series of events, relationships, or circumstances within or connected to religious beliefs, and I'd add doctrines, practices, or structures that is experienced by an individual as overwhelming or disruptive and has lasting adverse effects on a person's physical, mental, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. It's not a misapplication of religion. It's the result of religion and religious doctrines and environments.

[00:19:43]I'll keep this simple.

[00:19:45]Being traumatized by the idea of hell, expressed clearly in the Bible as eternal conscious torment, is not religion misapplied, but rather doctrine manifested and made living and active in someone's mind. Being traumatized by believing you are inherently worthless and wicked from birth, deserving of hell, is not religion misapplied, but adhering to a foundational precept of Christianity. Reading about demonic forces that steal from, kill, and destroy their victims is directly found in the text. Being commanded to fear the God who can throw you and your soul into hell to destroy? That's not religion misapplied. That's taking the Bible at its word. An inherent feature of Christianity demands you accept that you're born sinful and wicked, and without receiving Christ as your savior, you are doomed to eternal conscious torment. That's not misapplied religion, that's foundational doctrine to this toxic belief system. Christians always want to outsource responsibility for religious trauma to everything but the actual Bible. They'll blame bad apples in the church, false teachers in the church, and and yeah, those things exist and can contribute to trauma. But they'll blame those things before they'll blame their malevolent God and the text that defines him. And those false teachers are reading directly from the Bible and interpreting it and applying it just as you are. Okay, continuing. Within historic Christianity, formation of children is meant to occur in the context of love, moral order, and gradual understanding.

[00:21:19]Christ's own teaching, "Let the children come to me," frames spiritual development not as coercion, but as invitation.

[00:21:27]Except that there's always the threat of eternal conscious torment if you don't accept and believe. There are even negative earthly consequences, well, like curses, if you don't accept that invitation. That's the very definition of coercion and the absence of free will also, by the way. And we covered this already in a previous response, but the garden story lacks love, moral order, and gradual understanding. And that's God dealing with his only two children on the planet. And when we see this God repeatedly command the slaughter of infants and children in all the conquest narratives, explain to me how children are supposed to feel safe, loved, and that this God values and prioritizes moral order.

[00:22:10]Well, HG, God is constantly trying to restore moral order by killing the people and nations who are corrupting it. Right, so he does that by slaughtering innocent children and infants, having women raped and telling his armies soldiers that they can capture and use as sex slaves young virgin girls from the nations they conquer.

[00:22:28]Got it. Tell me all the firstborn Egyptian children minding their own business during the Passover that God cares about love, moral order, and gradual understanding. Tell all the children drowned in the flood how much God cares about gradual understanding.

[00:22:44]Well, I mean, I guess I guess they had 40 days to reflect on how evil they were before the water overtook them and they breathed their last. That's kind of a gradual genociding, I guess. I think God cares a whole lot more about cursing, punishing, and eliminating. I think he cares more about flexing than fixing. Come on, HG, Jesus is the ultimate love flex and fix.

[00:23:07]Except that we've already demonstrated in the original video that Jesus wouldn't be necessary had God not so excessively flexed his cursing muscle and saddled us all with original sin.

[00:23:18]What an absolute joke to tell people that Christianity is safe and healthy for children.

[00:23:24]This is making me sick, but let's finish up. When harm occurs, example, fear-based teaching, manipulation, it represents a deviation from doctrine, not its fulfillment. Except it is the doctrine. God promises the worst kind of harm to those who disobey, even his chosen people who disobey. Maybe this commenter is reading a version of the Bible I don't know about. I get that you can subjectively cherry-pick pretty verses from the Bible and say, "Look, see, God is love. Look what Look, that he welcomes children to come to him, and anyone who harms a child should have a a millstone tied around their neck and thrown into the sea."

[00:24:00]So let's tie a millstone around Jesus's neck for all those innocent infants he commanded to have slaughtered. Yeah, until Christians stop saying Jesus and Yahweh are one, I won't stop convicting Jesus for Yahweh's crimes. He finishes with, "To treat such distortions as the essence of religion is a categorical error." A lot of misused philosophical terminology here to sound intimidating and accurate, but I've never said that God's malevolence is the essence of religion, but I don't even know what you mean by the essence of religion. The essence of Christianity is its salvation-damnation paradigm.

[00:24:39]That paradigm alone induces trauma and exposes flaws in the biblical narrative.

[00:24:45]Moving on. Well, it seems you don't understand the Bible and why God did certain things. And it's not your fault.

[00:24:51]Bible doesn't explain everything very well, especially since they took books out of Bible. If he created a perfect world, you wouldn't know what evil was.

[00:25:01]Don't be so hard on us Christians.

[00:25:04]What an interesting comment and so honest, actually. I think this commenter should speak up more. This person is is right. It's not our fault that we don't, or rather can't, understand the Bible. It's a mess, full of contradictions, incongruencies, irreconcilable passages, and of course, an evil God. This person acknowledges what is so problematic for Christianity, the various historic council decisions to add and subtract certain books based on political and social pressures and agendas. Different versions of Christianity have different Bibles. Not many Christians know this. Scholars like Bart Ehrman and Dan McClellan can do a much better job explaining this than I can. But here's a very brief summary.

[00:25:49]Different Christian denominations use Bibles with varying numbers of books because they recognize different canons.

[00:25:57]Most Protestant Bibles contain 66 books, excluding a group of writings called the Deuterocanonical books or Apocrypha, which they do not consider authoritative. Roman Catholic Bibles include these additional texts such as Tobit, Judith, and First and Second Maccabees, bringing their total to 73 books. Eastern Orthodox Bibles include even more, often totaling around 76 to 81 books depending on the tradition, because they draw from the Greek Septuagint and accept additional writings like Third Maccabees and Psalm 151. These differences stem from early disagreements in the history of Christianity over which texts were divinely inspired and should be included as scripture. So there's that. Then the commenter said, "If we had a perfect world, we wouldn't know what evil was."

[00:26:46]Unless I'm missing something, is that a Is that a problem? Must we have a world with evil? Did God have to create a world that he cursed with evil and disasters? Raise your hand, who who would prefer a perfect world where we wouldn't know what evil was? I mean, aren't all Christians striving to attain that world after they die? Isn't that world the ultimate reward? And and finally, I'll make a deal with you. I'll stop being hard on Christians when Christianity stops ruining so many lives by traumatizing so many. Deal?

[00:27:20]And of course, we have to have the threats in the comments. "Remember your rebellion against God because it will haunt you throughout eternity. Jesus is your only hope, like it or not."

[00:27:30]Doesn't it suck for me that I walked away from Christianity not to sin and live a depraved life, but because I was so traumatized by it, I nearly took my own life. Doesn't it suck for me that I was so undone by Satan or God's torment that I almost couldn't bear to go on?

[00:27:47]Yeah, strong language, but I'm being real with you guys. And so Christians like to remind me that because I went through such severe religious trauma and found my way out of it, my reward is now eternal conscious torment. They like to remind me that I'm trading this life's trauma for an eternity of trauma. That's the false dichotomy they present. They like to condemn me by piling trauma on top of trauma. They like to remind me that I brought all of this on myself. They like to remind me that it's my fault I was traumatized by Christianity despite how much I prayed for God's help and healing. They can't see that they're only reinforcing the toxicity of this religion, the very toxicity that drove people away from it. And I'd love for you to watch this video I made a while back to round out my response to this comment. I played with the idea that I've died and now I'm facing God and Jesus at the judgment. It's the conversation I'd like to have with them at that time. If this God won't listen to me in that moment, if this God won't have the decency to hear my case, if this God won't allow me to present the facts, then Christians have once again proved why this religion is so toxic and their God is so malevolent. I am resisting this God if he were real, because he traumatized me. But Christians, take heart.

[00:29:05]Your God would know how to reach me in a way that wouldn't traumatize me based on my history of childhood sexual and physical abuse and having been introduced to him through the end times narrative. Give him some credit. I'm open to God presenting himself to me that way, and I can guarantee that it doesn't help his case or yours when you continue with the toxic threats or when you keep quoting scriptures at me. I know them. I know the pretty ones as well as the traumatizing ones.

[00:29:34]We've got just uh two more, and I promise we're going to go quick. HG is another Satanist that pretended to be Christian. Now, as a Satanist, HG says man doesn't sin and doesn't have free will to sin. I I've never said either of those things and I am only offering an internal critique of free will based on what the Bible says. Well, HG has sinned and he had the free will to sin and reject God's salvation through Jesus.

[00:29:58]Don't listen to HG contradicting satanic view.

[00:30:02]I'm not going to make this a discourse about free will. I've covered all the problems with that if you're basing a definition and application of free will on the Bible. Rather, let's take a look at what it means to be a Satanist and see if our commenter is right about that. A Satanist is someone who identifies with a set of beliefs or philosophies that use Satan as a central symbol, but that doesn't necessarily mean they worship a literal devil. In fact, most modern Satanists, especially those influenced by groups like the Church of Satan, are atheistic and view Satan as a metaphor for individualism, personal freedom, skepticism of authority, and resistance against oppressive norms. Their practices tend to focus on self-empowerment and critical thinking rather than devotion to a supernatural being. Others, such as some adherents of the Satanic Temple, emphasize secularism, compassion, and the separation of church and state using Satan as a literary figure representing rebellion against tyranny. A much smaller minority of Satanists do believe in or venerate a literal Satan, but this is far less common. Overall, Satanism is not a single unified religion, but a broad umbrella of beliefs that often challenge traditional religious ideas and prioritize personal autonomy and inquiry. So, first, I don't believe in a real Satan. I don't have some blood-soaked altar at home. I've not read Satanist materials. I don't own a Satanic Bible. But, I suppose since on my channel I advocate for critical thinking, skepticism of the Bible, and I do challenge its authority, maybe it's fair to call me a Satanist. But, biblically speaking, Satan is the father of lies and a murderer. I try to present the scholarship on religious trauma and I've got an ever-growing bibliography on my website that's linked below as honestly as I can. I don't lie to you about my experiences in Christianity.

[00:31:58]I'm very truthful, sometimes to a fault, about my childhood, my porn addiction, and how Christianity served me well and how it destroyed me. All truthful. And I haven't murdered anyone, nor do I intend to. It's okay if you think I'm being deceitful on my channel. All that signals is that your Christian identity is being threatened and challenged. I'll bet you embrace skepticism against concepts that aren't palatable to you, and you challenge any authority that didn't align with your beliefs, and that you value your autonomy and personal freedom, and you oppose oppressive norms, and hopefully, you're compassionate and empathetic. Most humans are these things and embrace these things, especially when they live in free countries like the United States. Well, I guess that also makes you a Satanist.

[00:32:52]And finally, we've got, "So, you believe on God, you just think he's bad? Cool.

[00:32:57]He's still God. You hardened your heart." So, this Christian agrees with me that God can be bad, but but so what?

[00:33:05]He's still God. Okay, and oh, the old hardened heart argument. Do we need to review all the passages in scripture where God does the heart hardening? We could start in Exodus with Pharaoh. Go back and read it. Make a list. Count up the number of times the scripture says Pharaoh hardened his own heart, God deliberately hardened it, or the passive Pharaoh's heart was hardened and it could plausibly be said God did the hardening there, too.

[00:33:33]Let me know what you find. What percentage is God doing the hardening?

[00:33:37]You can also read Romans 9:18, then bend your mind into a pretzel and tell me God doesn't harden hearts. Look, I'm open to this God showing up and setting me straight gently, without traumatizing me more in a way he knows would make sense to me. Ask him to soften my heart so I don't see him as an excessively brutal and savage, genocidal, immoral, misogynistic, traumatizing lunatic who sacrificed himself to himself to appease himself in order to forgive us of our sins, which he could have just done without cursing us and requiring an innocent man to be tortured and spill blood. Is that okay to ask you to pray for? Is that something this God could do and would want to do for someone like me, a non-resistant non-believer? I think the God of the Bible is a horrible monster. But, if I'm wrong, don't demonstrate that by actually being a horrible monster, too. That's not going to help. Okay, this uh went a little longer than I wanted it to, but I hope it helps those of you who are stuck or in the dark places see a bit more light and how to frame your own dissonance and sort it out in your minds. I believe the first step in overcoming religious trauma is to free yourself from having to accept these destructive doctrines.

[00:34:52]From there, you can begin to build community and a new identity. Head on over to either Brit Hartley's No-Nonsense Spirituality channel or my friend Duronte Lamar's channel for more on that. They both are doing exceptional work in that self and community building space. Glad you stopped by today, you guys. If you haven't yet subscribed, please do so so that this content reaches more people to help. And real quick, the best way to support the channel financially, if you can and want to do that, is to pick up your copy of On Monsters and Phantoms on Amazon. It's my memoir about severe religious trauma and de-converting from Christianity, and leave me a review. It's a raw and honest look into the diabolically harmful mind games Christianity plays with us. And let me know via email that you bought it so I can thank you in a future video.

[00:35:43]I've got tons of reader reviews on monstersandphantoms.com.

[00:35:47]And thank you, Liam, for purchasing the book, and to Misha Dillard. When you finish it, send me a review I can add to my website. I really, really appreciate your support. If I have missed a comment from you saying you have purchased my book, please email me so I can be sure to call you out by name and thank you in a future video. My email address is down below in the description of every video.

[00:36:10]It's hard for me to keep up with all my comments nowadays, so I may have missed some people and I don't want to miss you. I want to thank you. It's an absolute humbling honor that any of you would support and share my work. So, I'll see you again Sunday where we are going to tackle a question Christians think atheists cannot answer. And the question is coming from Gavin Ortlund, who we've responded to before. And I'm going to introduce you to some new and fresh arguments that you can add to your arsenal. Don't miss that one. So, until next time, let's continue to catalyze the conversation together about religious trauma to let those who suffer from it know that there is real hope, and to let those who dismiss it know that it's real.