In an article, “Ungodly abuse” (Feb. 28), readers learned of an evangelical church based in North Carolina, the Word of Life Fellowship, whose ex-members recently divulged secrets to the Associated Press regarding appalling mistreatment they suffered under the headship of founder Jane Whaley.

That abuse, including beatings and “blasting” (prolonged attacks of screaming), is intended to free members of “demon possession,” as evidenced by such horrendous peccadilloes as smiling and daydreaming, in the case of schoolchildren.

When I attended Catholic elementary school some 55 years ago, students weren’t subjected to such demented abuse, needless to say; but we were subjected to a form more insidious and enduring, just as students under Whaley’s despicable theocracy are: We were taught the doctrine of hell — and any willful, mortally sinful “thought, word or deed” could earn you its unending torture.

“A damnable doctrine,” Charles Darwin, a Christian-turned-agnostic, called it. It finds its origin in the New Testament, not the Old; and its originator was Christ himself, according to Gospel reports. Its inheritor was Muhammad, whose Quran is brimful of warnings to infidels and bad Muslims against hellfire.

As Mark Twain put it in “Letters from Earth,” a posthumously published collection of essays: “The palm for malignity must be granted to Jesus, the inventor of hell …”

The doctrine is one primary reason I parted ways with Christianity for good around the turn of the millennium. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. It’s light years beyond.

William LaRochelle, Lewiston

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