@Radicalfaery @atheistengineer Oh boy, I remember that line about the "god-shaped hole" - I think that came out of one of the big evangelical organizations (Billy Graham or Bill Bright or somebody like that) and it stuck. I wondered how they would have responded if someone, upon being told that everyone had this hole, had simply said, "Well I don't!"

The other thing that was weird as their belief that you could be "saved" right up to the moment of death, but not thereafter. So you could live your entire life in what they considered a "sinful" way, but as long as you said a "sinner's prayer" on your deathbed you were okay, but if you crossed over into the afterlife and immediately said such a prayer it was null and void. Only problem is that their holy book never said anything like that. Specifically, there is nothing that says your afterlife experience changes just because you say a particular prayer just before death. It does say that after you die there will be a "judgement" (or what near death experiencers commonly call a "life review", but of course the church had to turn it into something negative) but you aren't exempted from that just because you said a particular prayer.

So, basically, all their efforts to "evangelize" and convert people probably didn't do them a bit of good in the afterlife, but as we have seen lately it's turned a lot of people into terrible assholes BEFORE they die. Personally I think you would be a lot better off to never have said a single prayer in your life, but treated other people right to the best of your ability, than to have spent day and night in prayer but all the time wishing hateful things on the people you don't like (or have been taught not to like by those miserable excuses for humanity that pass thermselves off as preachers or ministers, but who are very much like the scribes and the Pharisees about which Jesus had not one good word to say).