# Judgment Houses: Scaring HELL out of You

An episode of [TheThinkingAtheist](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/412308695), 22 Oct 2024, 52 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/e/711/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/62376578/podcast_766_judgmenthousev2.mp3

They often LOOK like real haunted houses. In reality, they are torture-porn mission fields designed to scare people into Heaven. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/thethinkingatheist--3270347/support.

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
[0:09] Speaker 1: an idea.
[0:10] Speaker 2: The population of atheists in this country is going.
[0:13] Speaker 1: Through the rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred.
[0:18] Speaker 1: If I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
[0:22] Speaker 1: not because.
[0:22] Speaker 3: I put my hand on a book and made a wish.
[0:25] Speaker 1: And working together for a more rational world.
[0:28] Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking, feel so much more happiness.
[0:31] Speaker 2: Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
[0:35] Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
[0:43] Speaker 1: Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
[0:55] Speaker 2: I find it really interesting that the Bible is always
[0:59] Speaker 2: saying not to be afraid, and yet if you read
[1:02] Speaker 2: the Bible, it's a pretty scary book, even for Christians.
[1:07] Speaker 2: I think it's scary, and maybe it could be said
[1:10] Speaker 2: that it's the non Christian that's supposed to be most afraid.
[1:16] Speaker 2: We see believers and non believers lining up to go
[1:20] Speaker 2: through religious haunted houses, and these places have traumatic scenes
[1:26] Speaker 2: in them. You go from room to room to room,
[1:28] Speaker 2: and then you're supposed to leave and be kind of
[1:31] Speaker 2: freaked out. It's not uncommon for people to emerge and
[1:35] Speaker 2: they're just weird they're terrified about the world and the
[1:39] Speaker 2: devil the future. And yet Isaiah forty one to ten
[1:43] Speaker 2: tells the Christian fear not for I am with you.
[1:48] Speaker 2: But if we're honest, and you already know this, under
[1:51] Speaker 2: all the love language, it's a horror show. Oh right now,
[1:56] Speaker 2: the Christian says, now you got it wrong, my Lord,
[2:01] Speaker 2: He's love and light lives in my heart. He holds
[2:05] Speaker 2: my hand and guides my steps, and he turns every
[2:09] Speaker 2: moment into a happy Hallmark movie of sweet, sweet destiny.
[2:14] Speaker 2: Jesus God the same yesterday, today, and forever, which means
[2:20] Speaker 2: that he is the same loving God that you know
[2:23] Speaker 2: torched Sodom, burned everybody to death, and rained down sulfur
[2:28] Speaker 2: on human flesh, and shredded children with bears, and killed
[2:34] Speaker 2: Job's family after afflicting him with boils, and sent the
[2:38] Speaker 2: locusts and the blood rivers and the Angel of Death
[2:41] Speaker 2: to kill babies, and drowned the whole world and created Hell.
[2:45] Speaker 4: Oh we just Jesus gets me all choked up to
[2:49] Speaker 4: think about the love of God, you know, in the
[2:54] Speaker 4: context of scripture, I think it may make a lot
[2:58] Speaker 4: of sense that modern churches have implemented.
[3:01] Speaker 2: This specific tool designed to scare Satan out of people.
[3:06] Speaker 2: And of course I'm talking about hell houses. These are
[3:09] Speaker 2: also known as judgment houses that aren't loaded up with
[3:12] Speaker 2: vampires and witches and Freddy Krueger and freaks with chainsaws
[3:16] Speaker 2: and that kind of thing. I mean, these are really
[3:19] Speaker 2: their ideology driven places missions trips, except the missionaries aren't
[3:24] Speaker 2: coming to you. You're going into the mission field. Another
[3:30] Speaker 2: angle that is taken is that if you can survive
[3:35] Speaker 2: the judgment house, you are being tooled up like going
[3:38] Speaker 2: to boot camp, to fight fear in your lives. So
[3:42] Speaker 2: I had a listener named Gail tell me about something
[3:45] Speaker 2: called the Apocalypse Online produced by Copernium Studios dot com,
[3:51] Speaker 2: and they put a trailer out. Here's what they said.
[3:54] Speaker 3: Now, Ultimately, the Apocalypse Experience shows you what happens when
[3:58] Speaker 3: you take.
[3:58] Speaker 2: God out of the society.
[4:00] Speaker 3: And it just continues to go down. And you can
[4:03] Speaker 3: already see this happening right now. You can see the
[4:06] Speaker 3: evil that's running rempant in our society. So the Apocalypse
[4:11] Speaker 3: Experience will show you the truth and it will also
[4:15] Speaker 3: help you to learn how to fight fear.
[4:18] Speaker 2: There's a comedian named John Christ. He published this about
[4:22] Speaker 2: three or four years ago. I don't know the name
[4:24] Speaker 2: of the special, but he did a few seconds talking
[4:26] Speaker 2: about hell houses.
[4:28] Speaker 5: I think it all went wrong for me in youth Curb.
[4:29] Speaker 6: That's where it all started.
[4:30] Speaker 5: Makes a nice if you grew up in youth curb,
[4:31] Speaker 5: anybody or youth group. I grew up in youth Guru.
[4:35] Speaker 5: But like I've just reminded up. Because the Halloween just passed,
[4:37] Speaker 5: we had to like normal kids will go to like
[4:39] Speaker 5: on it house, we had to go to like Christian
[4:40] Speaker 5: aunted house. Everyone in one of these is called the
[4:43] Speaker 5: Judgment House. Yeah, you know, it's like it's weird like
[4:46] Speaker 5: Christian thing where you go to church and then they
[4:48] Speaker 5: take you.
[4:48] Speaker 2: Through like some scenes and the like they like, you.
[4:50] Speaker 5: Know, someone dies and then in this drama, then you
[4:52] Speaker 5: go to Hell.
[4:52] Speaker 4: But it's not really Hell.
[4:53] Speaker 7: It's like the youth room, but the heat turned up,
[4:55] Speaker 7: you know what I'm saying.
[4:55] Speaker 5: Then then you got to go to heaven. But the
[4:58] Speaker 5: heaven scene is somehow like freepier than the Hell scene.
[5:01] Speaker 5: You know, just a guy in the corner just sitting
[5:03] Speaker 5: there with a pet and a goat.
[5:05] Speaker 2: Just welcome to Heaven.
[5:13] Speaker 7: Ah.
[5:15] Speaker 2: On a related note, have you noticed how that's the
[5:17] Speaker 2: same with Christian movies you are Christian television or any
[5:21] Speaker 2: kind of Christian media. Whenever they show the Devil, it's awesome.
[5:27] Speaker 2: Even when it's bad, at least it's interesting. But when
[5:31] Speaker 2: they depict God in heaven, if they show God, and
[5:35] Speaker 2: they rarely do. When I think of God in the movies,
[5:39] Speaker 2: I think is Star Trek five, We're the alien impostor
[5:44] Speaker 2: God at the end with the big beard. He looks
[5:47] Speaker 2: just like a fluorescent light bulb with a beard on,
[5:50] Speaker 2: you know, and he's like, give me what I want.
[5:54] Speaker 2: You know, That's what I think of when I think
[5:56] Speaker 2: of God depicted in media. But usually it's just gold
[5:59] Speaker 2: light and clouds and shit. They're like, oh, it will
[6:03] Speaker 2: show just some really vacuous, empty calorie Thomas Kincaid painting
[6:10] Speaker 2: the most boring thing possible, and say, this is what
[6:13] Speaker 2: we want. That's where you want to go. This is
[6:18] Speaker 2: the interesting place up there. Meanwhile, you and I are like, well,
[6:22] Speaker 2: show me more of the Devil, because that's the part
[6:24] Speaker 2: where I was engaged. I was interested. Then over here
[6:28] Speaker 2: this looks like just a Yanni concert. You know, I'm
[6:31] Speaker 2: out on that. I'm out. There was a woman named Dana,
[6:37] Speaker 2: and she did an interview four or five years ago
[6:41] Speaker 2: for the magazine The Cuts, and she was talking about
[6:44] Speaker 2: her own hell house experience. These are her words, Dana said.
[6:49] Speaker 2: We went several years in a row with my youth group,
[6:53] Speaker 2: so I got to know it pretty well. But one
[6:56] Speaker 2: year they added a new scene. I don't remember exactly
[7:00] Speaker 2: how it started, but I think at the beginning of
[7:02] Speaker 2: the scene, you were watching a guy talk to himself
[7:05] Speaker 2: or something. And after a couple of minutes of this,
[7:09] Speaker 2: it was like they broke the fourth wall. You could
[7:12] Speaker 2: hear the cast and crew in the background talking louder
[7:15] Speaker 2: and louder, and then people with headset started to race
[7:19] Speaker 2: through the crowd and they were going, we got to
[7:22] Speaker 2: get out of here. Somebody's got a gun. It turned
[7:26] Speaker 2: into panic, into pandemonium, and it felt real. This was
[7:32] Speaker 2: the late nineties or early two thousand so, after Columbine,
[7:36] Speaker 2: and we thought all of this was really happening. I
[7:40] Speaker 2: was with my youth group, and I remember my youth
[7:42] Speaker 2: pastor tried to get our group to circle up together
[7:46] Speaker 2: in the middle of all this and hold hands and
[7:49] Speaker 2: pray like as a protection measure, which really okay, But
[7:55] Speaker 2: I remember I couldn't join the group because I just
[7:58] Speaker 2: couldn't move. I stuck. It was like the fight or
[8:02] Speaker 2: flight response, but it wasn't either of those really because
[8:05] Speaker 2: I was just frozen. I was watching everything like it
[8:09] Speaker 2: was in slow motion. And then the room went black
[8:13] Speaker 2: and a gun noise went off with a flash. It
[8:17] Speaker 2: sounded exactly like somebody had come in and started shooting
[8:21] Speaker 2: in the room. People were crouching and people were screaming
[8:26] Speaker 2: because we all thought it was real. We all really
[8:29] Speaker 2: thought we were going to die. And then it was
[8:33] Speaker 2: quiet and a voice comes on overhead that said something like,
[8:39] Speaker 2: what if this was real, where would you be going?
[8:43] Speaker 2: Heaven or hell? I still can't believe that really happened.
[8:48] Speaker 2: At the time, I wasn't angry or anything. All I
[8:51] Speaker 2: felt was relief that I wasn't going to die. I
[8:55] Speaker 2: was so active in youth group, and I even went
[8:58] Speaker 2: to a Christian high school, like on my church's property.
[9:01] Speaker 2: This was my world. But now it's like, how shitty
[9:06] Speaker 2: to do that to people. You couldn't do it now
[9:09] Speaker 2: because of how prevalent gun violence is now. It would
[9:12] Speaker 2: be so dangerous, But it was dangerous then two Dana
[9:18] Speaker 2: is forty one years old today talking about that experience
[9:23] Speaker 2: that really marked her from decades ago. There was a
[9:28] Speaker 2: woman named Casey. She is now thirty three. She was
[9:31] Speaker 2: a teenager when she went through one of these places.
[9:34] Speaker 2: She said, I vividly remember the abortion scene. Oh my god.
[9:41] Speaker 2: I went to so many hell houses year after year,
[9:45] Speaker 2: and there was always an abortion scene. It was always
[9:48] Speaker 2: a girl in a hospital bed with the sheets soaked
[9:51] Speaker 2: in blood. It was so graphic, blood everywhere everywhere, so
[9:56] Speaker 2: so bloody. You as the audience to understand that she
[10:01] Speaker 2: has had an abortion and it was not done correctly,
[10:05] Speaker 2: and she's crying, and she was very pale and clearly
[10:08] Speaker 2: about to die. I still think about it sometimes. This
[10:13] Speaker 2: is a little bit TMI, but about ten years ago,
[10:16] Speaker 2: I was in the bathroom at my restaurant job and
[10:19] Speaker 2: I had my period and I was bleeding like an
[10:22] Speaker 2: excessive amount, and this substance came out. Who knows what
[10:26] Speaker 2: it was, but that brought me back immediately to that
[10:30] Speaker 2: scene in the hell house. Like, am I somehow having
[10:34] Speaker 2: an abortion? It was so scary. I'm okay, obviously, but
[10:40] Speaker 2: that completely brought back the memory of the hell house.
[10:44] Speaker 2: I thought I was going to bleed to death. There
[10:50] Speaker 2: was a two thousand and one documentary called Hell House
[10:53] Speaker 2: that kind of went behind the scenes. It's not a
[10:56] Speaker 2: great documentary, it's not all that well produced, but it
[10:59] Speaker 2: does have you utility and showing you kind of behind
[11:01] Speaker 2: the scenes what's going on. And there was a scene
[11:06] Speaker 2: or a section where they talked to a mother who
[11:09] Speaker 2: had toured an abortion scene with her daughter and then fainted.
[11:14] Speaker 2: This kind of heavy, but here's a clip from that film.
[11:17] Speaker 5: We have here.
[11:18] Speaker 3: Her name was Jen, She's seventeen years old.
[11:20] Speaker 6: She's a Canu abortion pill.
[11:21] Speaker 8: Are you forty six? Two days ago She's been bleeding
[11:23] Speaker 8: ever since this morning.
[11:24] Speaker 3: Complains of severe abdominal cramps in her blood cutters eighty
[11:27] Speaker 3: or six.
[11:27] Speaker 2: Ye I want to bleeding up.
[11:31] Speaker 4: This wouldn't be a big deal.
[11:36] Speaker 1: I can't.
[11:36] Speaker 4: It's just the olph and it'll never be over.
[11:39] Speaker 9: Jan Well, we were going through the hospital scene and
[11:44] Speaker 9: I guess it's abortion scene. It just looked really lifelike
[11:48] Speaker 9: and real, and I just kind of looked. I got
[11:51] Speaker 9: real sick at my stomach, and I was trying and
[11:54] Speaker 9: I just started to faint. But I had two miscarees
[11:56] Speaker 9: before we had her. She's our miracle baby, and it
[11:59] Speaker 9: just it was so lifelike that it just brought back
[12:02] Speaker 9: some memories to me and I just passed out.
[12:05] Speaker 2: So you miss a lot with having an audio podcast.
[12:10] Speaker 2: But I mean, they wheel this what looks like a
[12:12] Speaker 2: sixteen year old girl in and she's wearing a hospital gown,
[12:17] Speaker 2: but all down the front of her and between her
[12:19] Speaker 2: legs and down her legs is just blood. They just
[12:22] Speaker 2: laid her out. They splayed her legs out, and they
[12:26] Speaker 2: poured blood on her, and she's being wheeled out, screaming,
[12:30] Speaker 2: Oh God. I thought the pill would make it easy,
[12:33] Speaker 2: you know, the Day After pill or the Plan B
[12:36] Speaker 2: pill or whatever. I thought this would be an easy
[12:38] Speaker 2: way to get past my pregnancy. And look what horrors
[12:41] Speaker 2: have happened to me. She's obviously both being punished by
[12:45] Speaker 2: God and being attacked by the devil. If only she
[12:49] Speaker 2: had done it, Jesus is way, and you see what
[12:52] Speaker 2: I mean about offensive. Right. Okay, here's some audio from
[12:58] Speaker 2: a Baptist church in play Doesn't Grow of Alabama. This
[13:01] Speaker 2: was actually investigated by Alabama Local News, and they take
[13:07] Speaker 2: you through many of the scenarios we've talked about. Their
[13:11] Speaker 2: hell house or Judgment house has a room and it's
[13:14] Speaker 2: straped in white fabric. And there's a guy, a sort
[13:17] Speaker 2: of elderly statesman, gray hair and beard, and he's standing
[13:21] Speaker 2: behind a podium and he's got a great big book
[13:24] Speaker 2: in front of him, and people are lining up one
[13:29] Speaker 2: at a time in front of the podium. Here's a clip.
[13:32] Speaker 10: After that, we move into the judgment room. Each person's
[13:36] Speaker 10: name is called in turn, and they are told that
[13:38] Speaker 10: their name is not in the Book of Life, and
[13:40] Speaker 10: therefore they shall be cast into the lake of fire.
[13:43] Speaker 2: Caitlin Brexton, please step forward. Your name is not in
[13:49] Speaker 2: the book Black please step back. Then we go to hell.
[13:55] Speaker 2: All the decisions you make so far, and let you
[13:58] Speaker 2: hear look around there is no escape. Here's a clip
[14:10] Speaker 2: from Beulah New Life Church. They actually had a promo
[14:16] Speaker 2: on YouTube about their twenty twenty one Hell House and
[14:19] Speaker 2: they did the same damn thing. They bring people in,
[14:21] Speaker 2: they put them through trauma, and then they've got the
[14:24] Speaker 2: devil waiting in the room which is the entrance to Hell.
[14:27] Speaker 2: It's bathed in red light and smoke, and they actually
[14:29] Speaker 2: had fire machines of the fire on the wall. I
[14:32] Speaker 2: don't know if the fire marshall knew that they were
[14:33] Speaker 2: doing it, and he had the voice changer, you know.
[14:36] Speaker 2: So people walk in and he's waiting. He's so gleeful
[14:39] Speaker 2: that he gets to throw them in hell. He's like,
[14:41] Speaker 2: ah ah ah.
[14:48] Speaker 8: Lucy didn't live her life for God. She didn't except
[14:52] Speaker 8: Jesus when she had a chance, and now she'll spend
[14:55] Speaker 8: an eternity without him in hell, it says Book of Matthew.
[15:01] Speaker 8: Then I will say to those on my left, depart
[15:03] Speaker 8: for me, so through are cursed to the lake of Fire,
[15:07] Speaker 8: prepared for the devil and his fallen angels.
[15:10] Speaker 2: Now what you can't see in the audio podcast is
[15:13] Speaker 2: right next to this preacher woman, there's a dude still acting.
[15:17] Speaker 2: He's sitting on a rock and all around his neck
[15:21] Speaker 2: draping his chest are it must be fifty pounds of
[15:25] Speaker 2: chain metal chain. So he's sitting there just kind of
[15:29] Speaker 2: fiddling with his chains and looking all sad and constipated,
[15:32] Speaker 2: while she's like, God will say to those on his left,
[15:36] Speaker 2: I hope you're covered with the special sauce because you're
[15:40] Speaker 2: going on the gril. Yeah. A few years back, The
[15:47] Speaker 2: Guardian sent some reporters documentarians here to experience an American
[15:53] Speaker 2: hell house. They went to Lynchburg, Virginia. This was one
[15:57] Speaker 2: run by Liberty University. Gary Jung and Lawrence Topham attended
[16:02] Speaker 2: Scare Mayor and attempted to describe it to their European audiences.
[16:10] Speaker 11: Thousands of people come from not just Virginia but all
[16:13] Speaker 11: over the country to Scare Mayor. And there are really
[16:15] Speaker 11: two components to it. The first it's to scare of
[16:18] Speaker 11: the Jesus.
[16:19] Speaker 2: Have you do?
[16:20] Speaker 11: I know you? There'll be lots of students who are
[16:25] Speaker 11: acting a range of roles that are basically supposed to
[16:28] Speaker 11: teach you about the mortality, that death is just around
[16:32] Speaker 11: the corner and can happen to us every day. And
[16:35] Speaker 11: when you're all softened up and freaked out and thinking
[16:39] Speaker 11: about questions of life or death, comes a second part,
[16:43] Speaker 11: the preaching tense, at which the express aim is to
[16:46] Speaker 11: try and save your soul. And when I ask people here, well,
[16:49] Speaker 11: what happens if your soul isn't saved, they're very clear
[16:54] Speaker 11: hell and damnation.
[16:57] Speaker 2: The report tried to sum things up at the end
[17:00] Speaker 2: of the video with this.
[17:02] Speaker 12: It's difficult to come out of scam Ara and not
[17:04] Speaker 12: feel a little bit depressed. It's not just literally dark
[17:07] Speaker 12: it's metaphorically dark, but it seems to work on its
[17:11] Speaker 12: own terms. That could be because it reduces the many
[17:14] Speaker 12: shades of gray to just a few blacks and whites. Life, death, heaven,
[17:21] Speaker 12: and Hell.
[17:24] Speaker 2: I hear all the time from people who are not
[17:26] Speaker 2: citizens at the United States asking us what the hell's
[17:30] Speaker 2: going on over there, like the concept of a hell
[17:33] Speaker 2: house or a judgment house to somebody in the UK.
[17:37] Speaker 2: They're convinced we're all crazy, and I'm not sure they're
[17:40] Speaker 2: wrong either. I'm just saying now, many in this audience
[17:44] Speaker 2: are former religious people who have been through hellhouses and
[17:51] Speaker 2: even promoted them and brought people to them. Oh, I
[17:55] Speaker 2: want to hear their perspectives. Our show continues after this.
[18:03] Speaker 2: I am speaking in Knoxville, Tennessee, this coming Sunday, the
[18:08] Speaker 2: twenty seventh of October. A huge thanks not to my
[18:11] Speaker 2: hosts for the event, the Rationalists of East Tennessee. Wonderful group,
[18:16] Speaker 2: and they've set this whole thing up. It's going to
[18:18] Speaker 2: be one to three in the afternoon on Sunday, the
[18:21] Speaker 2: twenty seventh of October at the University of Tennessee Conference
[18:25] Speaker 2: Center and all are welcome. I'm bringing all new material
[18:30] Speaker 2: this is a fresh presentation and I think you're going
[18:33] Speaker 2: to have a really good time if you can make it.
[18:36] Speaker 2: I'll see you in Knoxville. Details at Sethandrews dot com
[18:40] Speaker 2: Slash events. Right now, we continue talking about judgment houses.
[18:49] Speaker 2: I've got Katie on the line. Katie, are you there?
[18:53] Speaker 6: I am.
[18:54] Speaker 2: Did you go through one of these things?
[18:56] Speaker 6: I was actually an actor for one of them when
[18:59] Speaker 6: I was a team Well, tell me about it. So
[19:03] Speaker 6: when I was about sixteen years old, this was probably
[19:06] Speaker 6: roughly the year two thousand and nine, this group called
[19:09] Speaker 6: Wings of Eagles Outreach came to my youth group and
[19:14] Speaker 6: they represented basically this organization called the ninety nine. And
[19:20] Speaker 6: according to them, the ninety nine stood for a statistical
[19:23] Speaker 6: ninety nine people who die every day from preventable tragedies.
[19:27] Speaker 6: And essentially you would walk through it. And there was
[19:31] Speaker 6: a drunk driving accident scene with corpses. There was a
[19:35] Speaker 6: meth house. There was a gang fight scene where this
[19:38] Speaker 6: girl got flat shamed, murdered and then dumped behind the
[19:42] Speaker 6: trash can, and I often played the dead body behind
[19:46] Speaker 6: the trash can. And there was a death by suicide
[19:51] Speaker 6: scene where you basically saw this tape of this girl
[19:55] Speaker 6: talking about it was kind of her confession tape about
[19:58] Speaker 6: why she was committing sue side. And then you would
[20:01] Speaker 6: walk in the room and see this bloodied actress in
[20:05] Speaker 6: the next room pretending to be dead, and then you
[20:08] Speaker 6: would end up in hell. And basically there was a
[20:11] Speaker 6: torture victim in the middle of the room, and Satan
[20:14] Speaker 6: was there, and there were demons, and then there was
[20:17] Speaker 6: this voice that said follow the light, and you would
[20:19] Speaker 6: go into the next room, and they had a scene
[20:23] Speaker 6: from the Passion of the Christ playing behind an actor
[20:26] Speaker 6: in the middle of the room pretending to be Jesus.
[20:29] Speaker 6: And then when you left, all of these people were
[20:31] Speaker 6: waiting to evangelize to you. So that was the gist
[20:35] Speaker 6: of it. But the thing that I have found insidious
[20:38] Speaker 6: about it in my adulthood, especially as I have gone
[20:42] Speaker 6: back and decided to research it a little bit more
[20:46] Speaker 6: and see what other people have said about it. And
[20:49] Speaker 6: I've watched the newscast that they put out locally when
[20:52] Speaker 6: it came to town. They very purposefully made sure that
[20:57] Speaker 6: everybody in the general public did not know that it
[21:00] Speaker 6: was supposed to be a Christian thing. They marketed it
[21:04] Speaker 6: as what they called reality theater quote unquote, and it
[21:09] Speaker 6: was more of a almost a scared straight you know,
[21:12] Speaker 6: but with theater type of thing, where they were trying
[21:15] Speaker 6: to say, see, kids, this is what happened when you
[21:18] Speaker 6: smoke and drink and da da dah. But they made
[21:21] Speaker 6: sure that the public had no idea that it had
[21:24] Speaker 6: anything to do with Christianity. They were trying to be
[21:27] Speaker 6: sneaky about it. And I remember specifically when we were
[21:32] Speaker 6: getting ready to put on the show and we were
[21:35] Speaker 6: all there early, the organizers of the event would essentially
[21:39] Speaker 6: tell all of us back with our little flip phones
[21:42] Speaker 6: at the time to not take photos or post anything
[21:45] Speaker 6: on my Space because they didn't want a cross, for example,
[21:49] Speaker 6: or any type of Christian paraphernalia to end up in
[21:52] Speaker 6: the background of the photo and end up online because
[21:55] Speaker 6: they specifically did not want the public to know that
[21:58] Speaker 6: it was Christian Katie.
[22:00] Speaker 2: Did I hear the words my Space?
[22:04] Speaker 6: Yes?
[22:05] Speaker 2: Yes, all right, So what year I always thought MySpace
[22:09] Speaker 2: was like? Was that twenty some years ago? When was this?
[22:12] Speaker 6: Well it was about two thousand and nine. This was
[22:15] Speaker 6: roughly the time when my Space was phasing out a
[22:18] Speaker 6: little bit, but people were still using it, like more
[22:21] Speaker 6: people were going to Facebook, but it was still I
[22:24] Speaker 6: think kind of the four smartphones, or at least before
[22:27] Speaker 6: I had one.
[22:28] Speaker 2: Well, I know you're not a psychologist, but do you
[22:32] Speaker 2: feel like whenever they put these things on, all these
[22:36] Speaker 2: purity types, these upright, up standing citizen types, the moral
[22:41] Speaker 2: godly types, do you feel like they're secretly getting off
[22:45] Speaker 2: on doing all this violent stuff.
[22:47] Speaker 6: Oh, for sure, I've always had because I was a
[22:50] Speaker 6: teenager during the time when bands like Flyleaf and Skillet
[22:54] Speaker 6: and all of them were really popular, and they were
[22:57] Speaker 6: kind of the edgiest thing that Christians were au to
[23:00] Speaker 6: consume at the time, And looking back, I definitely feel
[23:05] Speaker 6: like there was this feeling of they really enjoyed the
[23:09] Speaker 6: darkness of it. They really enjoyed every opportunity to talk
[23:12] Speaker 6: about Satan and Hell in a very dramatic, poetic, kind of,
[23:17] Speaker 6: if you ask me, masturbatory way, because that was their
[23:20] Speaker 6: only way of expressing their dark side. So I definitely
[23:24] Speaker 6: think all of the dark Christian media and the things
[23:29] Speaker 6: that dealt with the demonic under the guise of, oh,
[23:33] Speaker 6: this is so that we can know how bad it
[23:35] Speaker 6: is when you're not with Jesus. I definitely think there
[23:38] Speaker 6: was an air of we're actually doing this because we
[23:42] Speaker 6: secretly like it more than we are willing to tell
[23:44] Speaker 6: you we like it. If that makes sense.
[23:46] Speaker 2: Totally, Katie, I know you were behind the scenes as
[23:49] Speaker 2: an actor. I'm curious. I hear a constant theme. There's,
[23:54] Speaker 2: of course the hell room. There's the abortion room, there's
[23:57] Speaker 2: the car wreck room, there's the teen suicide room. Do
[24:00] Speaker 2: you know where they got the ideas for these? Is
[24:02] Speaker 2: there like a template the churches use or what?
[24:04] Speaker 6: Do you think they didn't specifically tell us and ours
[24:08] Speaker 6: actually didn't have an abortion room, but yeah, they basically
[24:14] Speaker 6: went around recruiting people from various youth groups in the area,
[24:18] Speaker 6: and I would imagine they were able to fund it
[24:22] Speaker 6: through volunteer work and things from the local churches, you know,
[24:26] Speaker 6: helping feed the actors and helping keep everybody safe and
[24:30] Speaker 6: facilitate the whole thing and all of that type of thing.
[24:34] Speaker 6: So they would just show up and say, hey, we
[24:36] Speaker 6: have this thing and we're using it to save people,
[24:40] Speaker 6: and sign up if you want, you know, that type
[24:42] Speaker 6: of thing.
[24:43] Speaker 2: Any thoughts about yourself from fifteen years ago, you know,
[24:47] Speaker 2: before we wrap it up here, do you look back
[24:49] Speaker 2: and think, Wow, Yeah.
[24:52] Speaker 6: I definitely do sometimes, especially when I think about at
[24:57] Speaker 6: the time how much I thought it was a good thing,
[25:00] Speaker 6: how much I thought it was helping people and showing
[25:04] Speaker 6: them the reality of life without Jesus, And now I
[25:08] Speaker 6: realize that it was very manipulative and overblown, and it
[25:12] Speaker 6: was definitely there to, you know, make sure that people
[25:17] Speaker 6: were scared to not be Christians essentially, and you know,
[25:21] Speaker 6: it almost painted this very dramatic black and white. You know,
[25:25] Speaker 6: if you're not with Jesus, then well, you're probably going
[25:28] Speaker 6: to die in a mess house or something.
[25:29] Speaker 2: You know, Well, it sounds like you overcame your fear.
[25:33] Speaker 2: You doing okay today.
[25:35] Speaker 6: I am as much as I can. I have, thankfully
[25:37] Speaker 6: a really awesome supportive boyfriend who listens to my woes
[25:41] Speaker 6: quite often and helps me work through a lot of
[25:44] Speaker 6: my religious trauma. And I definitely thinks in part to
[25:50] Speaker 6: people like you who helped open my eyes to the
[25:52] Speaker 6: fact that none of it is real.
[25:54] Speaker 2: Hey, we're all in this together, Katie. I think we've
[25:57] Speaker 2: all we're all healing as best we cand. So thanks
[26:00] Speaker 2: for telling us about the behind the scenes thing. As
[26:03] Speaker 2: we talk about the hell houses and the judgment houses,
[26:05] Speaker 2: and I'm glad you're doing well.
[26:07] Speaker 6: Thank you so much.
[26:09] Speaker 2: I've got Stephen on the line. Steven, are you there, Hi, Amy,
[26:13] Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me. I actually asked Stephen
[26:16] Speaker 2: to give me a call for this show. I had
[26:18] Speaker 2: seen a post online about taking a group of atheists
[26:22] Speaker 2: through a hell house. Yeah, yeah, it was.
[26:25] Speaker 7: It was a lot of fun.
[26:26] Speaker 2: Okay, So this was where and when this.
[26:29] Speaker 7: Was Saint Louis, Missouri, I want to say around two
[26:32] Speaker 7: thousand and seven or two thousand and eight, so it's
[26:34] Speaker 7: been a minute.
[26:34] Speaker 2: You guys just decided you were going to go tour.
[26:36] Speaker 2: Did you tell them that you were atheists or what?
[26:40] Speaker 13: Not?
[26:40] Speaker 2: So much.
[26:41] Speaker 7: So we all kind of drove out there in a
[26:42] Speaker 7: few different cars, and we did have like t shirts
[26:45] Speaker 7: on Hi, I'm an atheist. I for exactly what they said,
[26:47] Speaker 7: but so we weren't hiding it. But we didn't come
[26:50] Speaker 7: there to like start a ruckus or anything. But we
[26:53] Speaker 7: would just like if somebody saw the shirt and they said, oh,
[26:54] Speaker 7: you're an atheist, and we were happy to talk about it.
[26:57] Speaker 7: And at one point one of the organizers do that,
[27:00] Speaker 7: the word traveled up, oh there's atheists, there's atheists, and
[27:03] Speaker 7: they actually came out. Someone came out and wanted to
[27:05] Speaker 7: make sure that we weren't there to cause trouble, like
[27:08] Speaker 7: you guys are going to be okay, you're not here
[27:09] Speaker 7: to starting No, no, we just want to experience it. Were okay,
[27:12] Speaker 7: And they said okay, well, as long as you behave yourselves,
[27:14] Speaker 7: you're okay to go through.
[27:16] Speaker 2: So give me some examples of what you saw inside
[27:19] Speaker 2: the doors.
[27:21] Speaker 8: Uh.
[27:21] Speaker 7: So they first led us into a house. It was
[27:23] Speaker 7: just next to the church, and we went into kind
[27:25] Speaker 7: of a living room area and we watched a video,
[27:28] Speaker 7: just an old VHS and it looked like it was
[27:31] Speaker 7: made late eighties, early nineties, I want to say, because
[27:33] Speaker 7: you know the hair, the kind of frizzy hair and
[27:36] Speaker 7: this style of clothing, and they were set up in
[27:38] Speaker 7: like a black studio room, but they were in like
[27:41] Speaker 7: a car and they were going through this scene and
[27:44] Speaker 7: there was an accident and then they're like this smoke
[27:48] Speaker 7: came in and then they're like in It was almost
[27:49] Speaker 7: like a purgatory kind of thing, but this wasn't a
[27:51] Speaker 7: Catholic church, but that was the sense you got that
[27:53] Speaker 7: it's like they're in that space between spaces and some
[27:55] Speaker 7: of them are going to heaven and some of them
[27:57] Speaker 7: are going to Hell. And then from there we were
[28:01] Speaker 7: let out to various different rooms in the church buildings.
[28:05] Speaker 7: Like it was kind of a rectory sort of thing,
[28:07] Speaker 7: and they had different little vignettes that you would walk
[28:11] Speaker 7: through and experience as like a spectator, and they had actors,
[28:14] Speaker 7: they had makeup. There was a morgue scene where they
[28:18] Speaker 7: were acting out and one girl was like seeing her
[28:20] Speaker 7: dead body. There was a hell room that was all
[28:22] Speaker 7: done up in black with like orange and red lighting
[28:25] Speaker 7: and like the kind of paper mache flames you kind
[28:27] Speaker 7: of see like blowing on fans, and they had a jack.
[28:29] Speaker 7: The heat up was really high, so you were kind
[28:31] Speaker 7: of sweating in there, and so there were various different
[28:34] Speaker 7: spaces like that, and you see the actors kind of
[28:36] Speaker 7: going through. It's like, oh, why did this happen? And
[28:38] Speaker 7: you know, I'm not supposed to be dead yet, No,
[28:40] Speaker 7: I want to go back and not me that. You know,
[28:43] Speaker 7: a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, I guess
[28:45] Speaker 7: you could say.
[28:46] Speaker 2: So, I mean this is like curiosity. Were you angry,
[28:50] Speaker 2: were you offended? Did you have a reaction?
[28:54] Speaker 8: Now?
[28:55] Speaker 7: For I think for most of us, yeah, we were
[28:57] Speaker 7: mostly just amused. I grew up Christian. I left the
[29:00] Speaker 7: faith when I was around my early twenties twenty twenty one.
[29:03] Speaker 7: We were baptized Catholic, and then my mother started trying
[29:06] Speaker 7: out different faces, like there were salad bars, and by
[29:09] Speaker 7: the time I was late teens, I was kind of
[29:10] Speaker 7: a dist for a while, and then a couple of
[29:13] Speaker 7: Christopher Hitchins, I got exposed to your stuff, you know,
[29:15] Speaker 7: Richard Dawkins, you know, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
[29:18] Speaker 7: kind of thing, And by the time I was early twenties,
[29:20] Speaker 7: I was pretty much out of it. And I was
[29:21] Speaker 7: an angry atheist for a while because a lot of
[29:23] Speaker 7: people are you feel so betrayed. But by the time
[29:25] Speaker 7: this rolled around, I was pretty much just like, oh,
[29:27] Speaker 7: it's just yeah, it's it's funny. But there was a
[29:30] Speaker 7: guy in our group. He was a Christian and he
[29:33] Speaker 7: would join us at these events from time to time,
[29:35] Speaker 7: and he was the most upset. At the end of
[29:39] Speaker 7: the tour. It was the altar call kind of thing,
[29:41] Speaker 7: and they brought us into rooms into kind of like
[29:43] Speaker 7: meeting areas inside the church, and there were different deacons
[29:47] Speaker 7: or pastors elders of the church who were there to
[29:49] Speaker 7: sit and witness with people and try to bring them
[29:50] Speaker 7: to Christ. And we got the honor of the pastor's son.
[29:55] Speaker 7: He's like, yeah, I heard you guys were coming through,
[29:57] Speaker 7: and I really wanted to sit down and talk with
[29:58] Speaker 7: you guys, and you know, get your impression. What did
[30:00] Speaker 7: you guys think? And me and the rest of the
[30:02] Speaker 7: atheists we were just like, so that was a thing.
[30:04] Speaker 7: And I remember I specifically asked him, I'm like, do
[30:07] Speaker 7: you really think that is this how you would want
[30:09] Speaker 7: to be shown Christ? Like do you think this is
[30:11] Speaker 7: going to resonate with people who are maybe searching or
[30:13] Speaker 7: who aren't sure how they feel? And he didn't seem
[30:16] Speaker 7: to have a good response to that one. But the
[30:18] Speaker 7: Christian in our group, he was livid. He was so
[30:22] Speaker 7: upset that they were taking this thing that he loved
[30:24] Speaker 7: very dearly. You know, he was from a different faith tradition.
[30:26] Speaker 7: But he was like, this is not Christ's love. How
[30:28] Speaker 7: could you do this to people? How could you show
[30:30] Speaker 7: them these things? Like you know, what are you doing?
[30:31] Speaker 7: And he was getting upset and he was his voice
[30:34] Speaker 7: was getting elevated, and we're like, colme down, you know,
[30:36] Speaker 7: we don't want to get kicked out, but the guy
[30:38] Speaker 7: was the pastor was a little bit apologetic about that,
[30:40] Speaker 7: so I think it was the first time he maybe
[30:42] Speaker 7: he had heard something like this, either from atheists or
[30:44] Speaker 7: maybe more importantly, from another Christian. But overall it was
[30:48] Speaker 7: a interesting and it's hard for me to put myself
[30:51] Speaker 7: even then, only maybe five or six years out of
[30:53] Speaker 7: the faith, like, how could I have bought into this?
[30:55] Speaker 7: It seems so silly now, And I just remember the
[30:57] Speaker 7: feeling I had the most was this is all silly,
[31:00] Speaker 7: but they take it so seriously. There wasn't even like
[31:03] Speaker 7: a positive message of like Heaven is going to be
[31:06] Speaker 7: this and this is why you should want to be
[31:08] Speaker 7: in heaven. It was every single scene that we ran
[31:11] Speaker 7: through was pain and suffering and misery and this is
[31:14] Speaker 7: what you have to look forward to. And you know,
[31:17] Speaker 7: I'd grown up hearing those stories, of course, so they
[31:20] Speaker 7: weren't exactly new, but to see it acted out in
[31:23] Speaker 7: this way, that was a first for me. And yes,
[31:26] Speaker 7: I said, just bemused, and I felt a little bit
[31:29] Speaker 7: sorry for them that this was so impactful for them.
[31:32] Speaker 7: It's like the Christian guy in our group that was
[31:34] Speaker 7: the most telling. He was mad that they were twisting
[31:37] Speaker 7: in his mind, that they were twisting his faith that way.
[31:40] Speaker 2: I think it's encouraging. Actually, it speaks to our values, right.
[31:43] Speaker 2: You guys disagreed on theology, but you had shared values.
[31:47] Speaker 2: He found it all just wrong headed and offensive, and
[31:50] Speaker 2: so I appreciate that in him, And I think that's
[31:53] Speaker 2: the part of the story that you've told I'll probably
[31:55] Speaker 2: take with me the most. You know that there are
[31:58] Speaker 2: even believers out there who know this. This is just bad.
[32:00] Speaker 2: This is just a bad, bad idea. Stephen. Thanks for
[32:04] Speaker 2: sharing your perspective in your story. Man, It's been my pleasure.
[32:06] Speaker 7: This is a great honor for Mekes that I've been
[32:08] Speaker 7: listening to you for a long time.
[32:10] Speaker 2: Thank you, Thank you so much. Here's another personal story.
[32:16] Speaker 2: Jace was thirteen when she went through the Hell House.
[32:21] Speaker 2: She said, I remember this one scene of a girl
[32:24] Speaker 2: killing herself. She was in her bedroom and there was
[32:27] Speaker 2: a little TV on her nightstand. It was supposed to
[32:30] Speaker 2: be showing us her memories, and apparently she had been
[32:34] Speaker 2: having premarital sex. And there's a pregnancy test on the
[32:39] Speaker 2: bed in front of her with a positive sign, and
[32:43] Speaker 2: then she kills herself. And I mean she like blew
[32:48] Speaker 2: her brains out. The light goes off, a gunshot goes off,
[32:52] Speaker 2: and when it comes back on you could see the
[32:55] Speaker 2: blood and brain matter all over on the wall and
[32:59] Speaker 2: the window and the bedsheets. I was terrified to thirteen
[33:05] Speaker 2: year old me, all the blood and everything looks so realistic.
[33:09] Speaker 2: That's one positive thing I can say about these things.
[33:13] Speaker 2: I guess the production quality was very good, terrifyingly good.
[33:20] Speaker 2: In twenty twenty two, FTD Facts did a feature, a
[33:24] Speaker 2: ten point feature on hell houses, and one of their
[33:28] Speaker 2: segments was talking about how many Christians disagree with the
[33:32] Speaker 2: whole thing for a variety of reasons. Here's the segment now.
[33:36] Speaker 14: Another criticism of these hell houses is the misuse of
[33:39] Speaker 14: church funds. Along with those who disagree with the use
[33:43] Speaker 14: of hell houses to teach about evil and grace, there
[33:45] Speaker 14: are also those like Reverend JT. Tucker, who believed ministries
[33:49] Speaker 14: that possess enough money to run a haunted house are
[33:52] Speaker 14: misusing their funds. He also thinks the shock of violence
[33:56] Speaker 14: in a hell house doesn't stick with the viewer for
[33:59] Speaker 14: that long, and anyone who does decide to join the
[34:02] Speaker 14: church after being led through one will likely leave as
[34:06] Speaker 14: quickly as they joined. He believes that trying to scare
[34:09] Speaker 14: people into a decision this big.
[34:11] Speaker 2: Is very wrong.
[34:12] Speaker 14: If you consider all the money along with the ministry
[34:14] Speaker 14: hours needed to put these events together, if they would
[34:17] Speaker 14: simply refocus the time and money on missions and properly
[34:21] Speaker 14: educating people, they would have a lot bigger return in
[34:24] Speaker 14: terms of gaining new converts.
[34:26] Speaker 2: This was a report by a woman named Vanessa, now
[34:30] Speaker 2: in her mid thirties, but she was looking back on
[34:33] Speaker 2: her young religious years and she talked about her own experience.
[34:38] Speaker 2: She said, the one that I remember very clearly. It
[34:42] Speaker 2: followed one child. I think it was a teenage boy.
[34:46] Speaker 2: So as you're going through the hell house, you're following him,
[34:51] Speaker 2: but sometimes branching off to follow his girlfriend or his
[34:55] Speaker 2: friends or whatever. But all the scenes were interconnected with
[34:58] Speaker 2: this one specific person. It all came back to him.
[35:03] Speaker 2: He grew up in an abusive home, and in what
[35:07] Speaker 2: I think was the very first scene, you heard the
[35:09] Speaker 2: abuse going on, his dad being violent and aggressive toward
[35:13] Speaker 2: his mom and toward him as well. You could hear it,
[35:16] Speaker 2: but you couldn't see it. Really. It was all shown
[35:19] Speaker 2: in shadows. I remember feeling like that was very scary
[35:23] Speaker 2: because I didn't like yelling in my own family at
[35:27] Speaker 2: this point. The boy was younger than I was, and
[35:29] Speaker 2: I was only about ten at the time, and it
[35:32] Speaker 2: was terrifying. I'm trying to think, did the dad kill
[35:36] Speaker 2: the mom? If not, at the very least he injured her,
[35:41] Speaker 2: And it felt like this was what set him on
[35:44] Speaker 2: a bad path. You see him grow up and now
[35:48] Speaker 2: he's a teenager going to parties, drinking drugs, having sex.
[35:52] Speaker 2: Somehow a school shooting works its way in there too,
[35:56] Speaker 2: if I'm remembering correctly. But the message definitely felt like
[36:00] Speaker 2: it wasn't so much that the dad was bad, it
[36:03] Speaker 2: was that this situation is not okay. It was almost
[36:07] Speaker 2: like it was saying that the kid shouldn't have gotten
[36:09] Speaker 2: himself into this situation. It just felt very victim blaming.
[36:15] Speaker 2: And the whole plot of the Hell House was this
[36:18] Speaker 2: kid had to deal with this domestic abuse, which made
[36:22] Speaker 2: him turn to these other bad things, these bad life choices.
[36:27] Speaker 2: Not being a Christian anymore, I can now say it
[36:30] Speaker 2: was pretty fucked up. Honestly. Now I'm in grad school
[36:34] Speaker 2: for counseling, and it's like, you go through these shitty
[36:37] Speaker 2: situations in life and it's pretty understandable if you would
[36:41] Speaker 2: turn to substances and things like that, if you're being
[36:45] Speaker 2: abused and you're not finding access to anything that's giving
[36:48] Speaker 2: you any sort of healing. It went from that domestic
[36:52] Speaker 2: violence scene to him drinking with friends. He was a
[36:55] Speaker 2: little older than a teenager, So this leads to the
[36:59] Speaker 2: car wreck scene. They took us outside in the parking
[37:03] Speaker 2: lot where there was this wreck car. It was so
[37:06] Speaker 2: realistic looking. They must have got a junked car, one
[37:10] Speaker 2: that had been in a wreck and placed it against
[37:12] Speaker 2: a tree, but it looked exactly like this car had
[37:15] Speaker 2: crashed into a tree. There were a couple police vehicles
[37:19] Speaker 2: out there too, and police lights. But what I really
[37:24] Speaker 2: remember is all the bodies. It was just bodies hanging
[37:29] Speaker 2: halfway out of the car, blood pouring out of them.
[37:33] Speaker 2: There was blood everywhere. I thought about that recently, actually,
[37:37] Speaker 2: when I was in my very first car wreck. I'm okay,
[37:41] Speaker 2: and my car is okay, but I was hydro planing
[37:45] Speaker 2: for a second and this scene flashed back to me.
[37:49] Speaker 2: It was so graphic. Okay, I'm going to take one
[37:54] Speaker 2: more phone call next, and then I'm going to talk
[37:56] Speaker 2: about an angle to the judgment house that we haven't
[37:59] Speaker 2: really covered much. And that's the tribulation, not just heaven
[38:03] Speaker 2: and hell, but what happens after Jesus arrives, right, he
[38:07] Speaker 2: appears in the sky and the trumpet sounds, everybody goes
[38:10] Speaker 2: up into heaven. All the believers are raptured, and then
[38:14] Speaker 2: Satan has given control of the earth for seven years.
[38:17] Speaker 2: And it's just crazy. It is crazy. Well, there is
[38:22] Speaker 2: apparently a judgment house that's an outdoor walking trail that
[38:27] Speaker 2: depicts the tribulation. I want to talk about that in
[38:31] Speaker 2: just a second. Repent my friends for the days at hand.
[38:44] Speaker 2: The Lord is coming and he loves you so much
[38:48] Speaker 2: that if you don't love him back, he's gonna buck
[38:51] Speaker 2: you up. I mean, I'm just saying. I think that's
[38:54] Speaker 2: in the Bible somewhere. It depends on the translation that
[38:58] Speaker 2: you use. Got a use the right translation. Let me
[39:02] Speaker 2: read this real fast before I go back to the funds.
[39:05] Speaker 2: This was published in Religion Dispatches by Lucia Hulsether from
[39:12] Speaker 2: the article she said, last week I partook in tribulation
[39:17] Speaker 2: trails brand of Hell house pageantry, and she's speaking about
[39:22] Speaker 2: tribulation trail in Stockbridge, Georgia. A total of twenty five
[39:27] Speaker 2: thousand participants every October go on a ninety minute walk
[39:33] Speaker 2: through the South Georgia Woods. We observed intensely violent renditions
[39:39] Speaker 2: of standard end time scenarios, the rapture of believers, an
[39:43] Speaker 2: ensuing period of torture and tribulation for the faithless left behind,
[39:49] Speaker 2: a climactic battle between Jesus and Satan, and a final
[39:53] Speaker 2: judgment in which Jesus orders a teenage church girl to
[39:58] Speaker 2: be dragged by demons into hell for quote knowing me
[40:04] Speaker 2: only in your head and not in your heart. Unsurprisingly,
[40:10] Speaker 2: scenes from the tribulation make up the majority of the walk,
[40:14] Speaker 2: and the anti Christ had established a totalitarian government after
[40:20] Speaker 2: duping the masses with his political charm. Based on the
[40:24] Speaker 2: Antichrist's orders, our tour group was being initiated into something
[40:29] Speaker 2: called citizen Change Camp. The main part of our initiation
[40:35] Speaker 2: was witnessing the execution and torture of people who refused
[40:41] Speaker 2: to denounce their Christian faith. Six out of twelve total
[40:47] Speaker 2: tribulation trail scenes involved executions. During one scene, we saw
[40:54] Speaker 2: a middle aged male soldier throw a preteen girl into
[40:58] Speaker 2: a coffin and spray her with blank bullets. In another scene,
[41:04] Speaker 2: soldiers played by teen boys forced a fellow teen to
[41:08] Speaker 2: watch his younger sister beaten to death with a club,
[41:13] Speaker 2: and yet another soldiers executed a girl played by a
[41:17] Speaker 2: child who could not have been more than eight years old,
[41:20] Speaker 2: in order to pressure her mother into renouncing Christianity. Between scenes,
[41:26] Speaker 2: men and teenage boys wearing camouflage and carrying automatic rifles
[41:30] Speaker 2: surrounded our group, pointed their guns at us, and herded
[41:35] Speaker 2: us to the next station. Along the pathways, we heard
[41:39] Speaker 2: the groans of child actors locked up in cages and
[41:45] Speaker 2: people begging us for water. What sense can we make
[41:50] Speaker 2: of this violence? Of all the things we could be
[41:53] Speaker 2: doing on Halloween, why in act scenes of torture? What
[41:56] Speaker 2: does this say about the sponsoring church, about you religious culture.
[42:02] Speaker 2: I don't pretend to have all the answers to these questions. However,
[42:06] Speaker 2: as I drove home, I thought about Joe Badgent, author
[42:10] Speaker 2: of Deer Hunting with Jesus, who writes about the political
[42:14] Speaker 2: and religious lives of working class white Americans, i e.
[42:19] Speaker 2: The people that make up the majority of tribulation, trails, cast,
[42:23] Speaker 2: and audience. And then the middle part of the article
[42:26] Speaker 2: talks about how the subtext of the Tribulation Trail was
[42:30] Speaker 2: a commentary on the oppression or persecution of white people.
[42:35] Speaker 2: Lucia Hulesether ends her piece by saying, this Tribulation Trail
[42:39] Speaker 2: is not solely about managing hypothetical fears of what may
[42:43] Speaker 2: happen in end time scenarios. It's about managing fears about
[42:48] Speaker 2: the present and imagining a way out. Now. This way
[42:52] Speaker 2: out is much more than metaphysical. It seems to fit
[42:56] Speaker 2: with the material realities of what it's like to be
[42:59] Speaker 2: a member of a working class in the US by
[43:02] Speaker 2: offering a sense of orientation and self worth to people
[43:05] Speaker 2: who have been demoralized and exploited in almost every possible way.
[43:11] Speaker 2: It follows that for progressives to mock something like the
[43:14] Speaker 2: Tribulation Trail for being purely misogynist, escapist, or a brainwashing
[43:20] Speaker 2: operation by the Christian right plays directly into the hands
[43:24] Speaker 2: of those who capitalize off the culture wars by appealing
[43:29] Speaker 2: to America's heartland. Right wing elites do not attend events
[43:34] Speaker 2: like the Tribulation Trail unless they're campaigning for political office,
[43:39] Speaker 2: but they speak its language and appeal to its values,
[43:43] Speaker 2: and then use the momentum they gain to stab its
[43:46] Speaker 2: working class people in the back without losing their votes. Yet,
[43:52] Speaker 2: as Badgeant rights, it is not far fetched for a
[43:55] Speaker 2: continually exploited group of people to vote for the man
[43:58] Speaker 2: who looks strong and enough to keep housing values up,
[44:02] Speaker 2: to destroy your unseen enemies abroad, and to give God
[44:06] Speaker 2: a voice in national affairs. For me, the terrifying part
[44:12] Speaker 2: of Tribulation Trail was not the mock executions or the
[44:16] Speaker 2: automatic rifles that people constantly pointed at my head. Rather,
[44:22] Speaker 2: it was thinking about the context in which all of
[44:24] Speaker 2: these things were happening and who would ultimately profit most
[44:28] Speaker 2: from this event. Hint, it's not the people who were
[44:32] Speaker 2: actually there. So yes, this is scary for all of
[44:37] Speaker 2: the reasons you might expect in many more. And you know,
[44:41] Speaker 2: that's an interesting angle to it, because Christians, as we know,
[44:45] Speaker 2: love to be persecuted, and Christians, being or at least
[44:49] Speaker 2: they have been, a majority class, certainly white Christians have
[44:52] Speaker 2: enjoyed monumental amounts of privilege, and now they're seeing the
[44:56] Speaker 2: impending end to their privilege where they have to eat equally,
[45:00] Speaker 2: share this country and this world with other people, people
[45:04] Speaker 2: of color, people who are LGBT, people who are of
[45:08] Speaker 2: another faith or none so what do they do. They say,
[45:12] Speaker 2: this is all part of the end times, this was
[45:14] Speaker 2: all expected, predicted Jesus Christ of the whole world was
[45:17] Speaker 2: going to go to shit before he returned. And all
[45:20] Speaker 2: of the things that we are depicting our symptoms of
[45:23] Speaker 2: the cancer, the oppression against us, the most privileged demographic
[45:31] Speaker 2: in the entire nation. I think that's a worthy angle.
[45:36] Speaker 2: I think that's a really good commentary and another layer
[45:40] Speaker 2: to the onion. When it comes to the judgment house,
[45:44] Speaker 2: I've got Crystal on the line. Crystal, are you with me?
[45:48] Speaker 15: I am.
[45:49] Speaker 2: We're talking about hell houses or judgment houses. What do
[45:52] Speaker 2: you have for us today? What's your experience?
[45:55] Speaker 13: It was a hell house and it was in Sherwood, Arkansas,
[45:59] Speaker 13: and was back in the nineties. I was with a
[46:03] Speaker 13: group of people. It was an abandoned grocery store right
[46:07] Speaker 13: by where I lived. There was nothing to indicate it
[46:10] Speaker 13: was any kind of religious. Now, I mean, it was
[46:12] Speaker 13: called hell house, but I had no idea at that
[46:15] Speaker 13: point what hell house was. And we went in and
[46:22] Speaker 13: nobody in line was even saying anything it was religious.
[46:25] Speaker 13: So we were all just excited for a new, supposedly scary,
[46:29] Speaker 13: haunted house. We went in, and I believe the first
[46:33] Speaker 13: exhibit was maybe a car crash, and it was terrible imagery.
[46:39] Speaker 13: But then when the preaching started, like I immediately, I
[46:43] Speaker 13: mean and I was a cultural Christian, but I wasn't
[46:46] Speaker 13: a Diaphord go to church every Sunday Christian and that
[46:50] Speaker 13: was just a little much. It made me very uncomfortable
[46:53] Speaker 13: and I just wanted to leave. Well, the little kids,
[46:57] Speaker 13: teenagers or young adults that were running the place did
[47:00] Speaker 13: not want to let me out, and they kept saying
[47:03] Speaker 13: the only way out is to move forward, and it
[47:07] Speaker 13: got pretty tense. I don't remember a lot, but there
[47:10] Speaker 13: was some yelling and I eventually had to threaten to
[47:14] Speaker 13: call the police.
[47:16] Speaker 15: For them to let me out of the building.
[47:18] Speaker 13: And I did not realize how much it really affected
[47:22] Speaker 13: me until I've been pondering it over this weekend, and like,
[47:27] Speaker 13: I still do not want to go into a situation
[47:30] Speaker 13: unless I know exactly what is going to happen.
[47:34] Speaker 2: Did they tell you why they wouldn't let you leave?
[47:37] Speaker 13: They said they needed you to experience the whole thing
[47:41] Speaker 13: to I can't remember something the bonus is at the
[47:45] Speaker 13: end or something like that. I can only imagine it
[47:48] Speaker 13: was some kind of mass saving thing. But no, there
[47:52] Speaker 13: was no real legitimate reason other than no, you just
[47:55] Speaker 13: need to finish what you started.
[47:57] Speaker 15: There's no there. You can't go backwards, you can only
[48:00] Speaker 15: go forward.
[48:01] Speaker 2: Do you feel like and this is a loaded, maybe
[48:04] Speaker 2: leading question, but do you feel like an experience like
[48:07] Speaker 2: this helped to push you out of the faith?
[48:10] Speaker 8: No?
[48:10] Speaker 13: Absolutely not. That came way later. I never truly believed,
[48:16] Speaker 13: but I just.
[48:17] Speaker 15: Always felt like I was bad.
[48:19] Speaker 13: And so it was not until after my mom died
[48:22] Speaker 13: in two thousand and nine, when I was really searching
[48:25] Speaker 13: for healing and comfort, that I came across God Is
[48:30] Speaker 13: Not Great sitting.
[48:31] Speaker 15: In a bookstore and just not in an area.
[48:34] Speaker 13: Where it was supposed to be. It was just like
[48:36] Speaker 13: right there on the shelf, and I was shocked. I
[48:39] Speaker 13: didn't even know we were allowed to have books like that.
[48:42] Speaker 15: And I bought that.
[48:44] Speaker 13: And that just started the journey. I went from that
[48:47] Speaker 13: book to The God Delusion and really, I mean, truly,
[48:52] Speaker 13: what did it?
[48:53] Speaker 15: Is? Your book deconverted?
[48:55] Speaker 2: Oh Stock, I didn't set you up to say that, Crystal.
[49:00] Speaker 13: I know you did not, but I am one hundred
[49:03] Speaker 13: percent serious reading from your perspective of a true Christian
[49:08] Speaker 13: that came out of that. That is what made it
[49:11] Speaker 13: okay for me to be okay, because I always, throughout
[49:16] Speaker 13: my life felt like I.
[49:17] Speaker 15: Was doing something wrong because that's what I was told.
[49:19] Speaker 13: You're not trying hard enough, you're not really inviting God
[49:22] Speaker 13: into your heart, You're not doing this, you're not doing that.
[49:25] Speaker 13: But I was doing all of those things as a
[49:28] Speaker 13: kid and never getting results. And even as an adult.
[49:32] Speaker 13: I mean, I joined a church in two thousand and four,
[49:35] Speaker 13: and I mean that was truly my last foray into
[49:39] Speaker 13: any type of organized religion, and it was an awful experience,
[49:44] Speaker 13: just like every other church had been an awful experience.
[49:47] Speaker 15: And I mean.
[49:49] Speaker 13: Truly, if I had not read your book, I would
[49:51] Speaker 13: probably still be very confused and unsure of myself. I mean,
[49:55] Speaker 13: I am still very confused and unsure of myself, but
[49:57] Speaker 13: not when it comes to religion and atheism.
[50:02] Speaker 2: That's so sweet of you to say. It's funny when
[50:04] Speaker 2: people produce content like this. You know, you always think,
[50:08] Speaker 2: I hope it matters, So I hope it makes a difference.
[50:11] Speaker 2: I hope somebody cares, because otherwise I'm just talking to myself.
[50:14] Speaker 2: So that's that's a huge gift that you've given me
[50:17] Speaker 2: so thank you. Don't you wish Christopher Hitchins would walk
[50:21] Speaker 2: through a hell house and give commentary? Would that not
[50:24] Speaker 2: be awesome?
[50:25] Speaker 13: Oh my god, Yes, yes it would. And I wish
[50:30] Speaker 13: that he was still with us now, But yes, I
[50:34] Speaker 13: really feel the loss of Christopher Hitchins.
[50:37] Speaker 2: Well, I appreciate you sharing your perspective, and honestly, I'm
[50:41] Speaker 2: glad that you left. You know, you decided, Hey, I'm
[50:44] Speaker 2: going to draw a boundary. I'm done, I'm out, and
[50:46] Speaker 2: you didn't let them keep you in. So good on you, Crystal,
[50:51] Speaker 2: Thank you. I guess there's nothing left to say except
[50:55] Speaker 2: the hell houses. Judgment houses are out there. Their church run.
[50:59] Speaker 2: They have an agenda. They freak a lot of people out.
[51:01] Speaker 2: They're selling guilt and shame. Be aware, spread the word.
[51:04] Speaker 2: There are plenty of other great ways to go out
[51:07] Speaker 2: and enjoy a haunted house. And thanks for listening, Thanks
[51:11] Speaker 2: to my callers and contributors, and I will catch you
[51:15] Speaker 2: next week.
[51:15] Speaker 1: Follow the Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter for a
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