I never quite “got” religion… not until I started reading HP Lovecraft and finally grokked the concept of “Cosmic Horror.” With that understood, I could finally kinda understand religion, just not as most religious folks would prefer it. I read tales of some god or other flipping his marbles and wiping out a family, a city, a world, and I see it as not a miraculous wonder but a Grade-A Cosmic Horror. And then when you get to the idea of a soul that can exist forever… yeesh. Couple that with the concept of damnation, or even just a soul getting twisted up to serve as little more than an MP3 player spitting out “holy holy holy” for all of eternity, and the horror approached mind-snapping levels.
But you don’t even need to deal with “God” to get to horrifically terrifying madness inducement. The Bible, for example, speaks of angels. These are often depicted as men or women with wings, but the Biblical descriptions of at least the seraphim – the highest “order” of angels – read like something Lovecraft would have dreamed up while tripping on an overdose of LSD.
HPL came up with some doozies. But nothing compares with the idea that you have an immortal soul and that you could spend an eternity being tortured because you did not follow rules that not only did you not understand, but were perhaps quite unaware of and perhaps they would have been impossible for you to follow (quick: don’t think of an elephant). In HPL’s world, for humans dead is dead, pretty much. But in religion, dead is just the start of an eternity of madness and agony. For HPL, the “gods” don’t care about you. In religion, the gods *do.* And chances are very high that they despise you. Wheeeeee.