>>24686582
I'm in the same boat as you, and while I still grapple with the existential dread that the belief in hell brings, I've managed to transform my programmed fixation on Christianity into genuine enthusiastic study of the religion from the agnostic perspective of someone who feels the pull to believe but knows it's ultimately incompatible with how I understand the world as an adult. For whatever reason (likely because I was indoctrinated), I can spend hours reading books and watching essays about Christianity: how ancient Israelite religion evolved from polytheistic Canaanite traditions, how monotheistic Judaism evolved over time from disaster after disaster, how the stories in the OT and NT were modified and redacted and came to find their present form, why specific books and beliefs were discarded. And more importantly, what these things say about the people who believed in them, how they were responses to problems of their own time, and how these stories of passion and woe give us an insight into the human condition and the desire to reach out and know a loving God. I still feel strong emotions reading the Bible, looking at religious artwork, and listening to Christian music (not the modern rock trash, but sacred harp choir stuff and the like). Because even if I don't believe that the religion is literally true, I still find comfort and kinship in their ideas. A loving mother, a son who redeems us despite our faults. So that's sort of how I approach and extract value from Christianity as an ex-believer, not through modifying it to fit my needs, but acceptance of its faults and exaltation of its beauty, knowing that its believers ultimately feel the same way I do. It fills my God-shaped hole, at least partially.

To your second point, I think it's futile to attempt to "fix" a religion, either for yourself or for others. Like you mentioned, people mold their religion to fit their pre-existing values, and you can see it happening less than a decade after Jesus was crucified. And on an individual level, I think what you've been brought up with will always stick with you at a more fundamental level than anything you learn along the way. Buddhism is most likely a belief system that fits best with how I understand the world now, but I can't bring myself to accept it at anything deeper than a "scientific" level. Maybe Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism is the correct path forward for those who need something deeper out of traditional Christian belief, but he filters me.