Former atheists who now believe in God, what was it that changed your beliefs?

That's an even deeper idea embedded in those teachings. The reason that it's literally the the body and soul of Jesus is because regulating your habits/rituals/traditions is what allows you to manifest some order or control in your life. Having these kinds of traditions taken literally as connecting one to a 'higher spirit' merely places the importance of having control in your life as the most important thing. It's like your willpower can only concentrate on so much and so knowing exactly how your day / parts of your day are going to go allows you to metaphorically keep one foot on stable ground so you can free up another one to take a step somewhere. It's also a moment meant to remind one of the last supper. It's probably the most 'jesus' thing jesus is known for besides being crucified and resurrecting. So it's an affirmation that you dedicate yourself to certain moral values and meant to be at the centre of your daily structure.

The idea that you go to hell is that if you abandon the teachings and moral values ascribed to you by something like a 'system of morality' or religion then you have no reason to really regulate your life through disciplined structure. There has to be an order to any chaos for anything to happen at all. And so if you don't have control in your life, it becomes rather empty, and hellish. Frankly it's probably a real good lesson to generations of farmers who had to do the same old routines every day... which were plentiful. But it's so unfortunately necessary today given how so many fail to organize the free time around their life into learning new skills and information instead of giving rise to the multi-billion dollar industry of social media. Just hours and hoours that could have been spent making the world a better place by people voluntarily educating themselves instead or solving real world problems and helping people. And you fairly frequently hear on social media about how social media is making people 'isolated' and 'lonelier' because they're not genuinely connecting to others. So I think it's fair enough to say that people drag themselves through degrees of hell all the time. People could always lead richer lives and experiences... and through those experience enrich more. Heaven is sort of about the legacy you leave behind more than anything genuine about being in the clouds. You sort of really would be if you were the kind of person that people "looked up to" when they thought of inspiring people.

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