I think that it is quite disingenuous to imply that religion doesn’t claim it is a literal god. They do. At least the big 3 do. And all the evangelical ones do. Literal god. Literal scenarios. Not a psychological technique to find some inner peace, but a literal good vs evil reality is what they all claim.
And no that wouldn’t change my opinion on it because all of that can just as easily be achieved without religion. In fact it is far easier and better without religion skewing it all. I spent years as a kid being terrified I was broken and evil and wrong because religion told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was. And despite my best attempts I couldn’t ever get close to being the perfect little follower when it seemed like everyone else was. Spoiler, they were all faking it just like I was, because they were all afraid they weren’t good enough. It’s all performative. All of it.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the problem wasn’t much religion telling you these things as the fact that your parents were also clearly broken and/or incompetent, yet continued to persist in pretending that they could somehow fix you.
You definitely go through some stages of brokenness as a child growing up because everything doesn’t necessarily grow at the same rate or the same time, so I don’t think it’s necessarily abusive to be upfront about that. What IS abusive is letting you continue to labor in that state without providing any sort of hope for relief — which the Bible clearly does, but your parents and priests may not have.
Healing from this can only occur when you start putting the blame on the right people and hold those responsible who actually caused the problem. Projecting your issues onto the entire faith or even the concept of religion as a whole is unjust and counterproductive.
