I think it was Hitler who was once quoted as saying "When one provokes in a child a fear of the dark, one awakens in him a feeling of atavistic dread. Thus this child will be ruled all his life by this dread, whereas another child, who has been intelligently brought up, will be free of it." Sadly my brother in law and his wife understand this and use it in such a way that to any free thinking person would be thought of as malevolant.
Luckily I was molded by parents who operated with a moral respect for my psyche. I was free to look into any religion, church or metaphysical realm I wanted to play with at will. The result was me doing that only when I hit puberty. This is a natural progression because there really was no way I could have made metaphysical decisions regarding my personal spiritual belief system until I had reached that level of development.
Telling a child that they will go to Hell if they don't believe in Jesus is pretty much the same thing as saying if you don't eat your peas the boogy man will eat your toenails off. My message to the "ruled by dread" crowd is this. At least have enough respect for your own family members' boundaries to objectify for two seconds, or long enough, to realize that using faith as the basis for an argument is the most retarded concept ever invented. When you do this to kids who can't understand that your reasoning is flawed and have no way to compare or contrast it to anything else in their experience then you are damaging them as you have been damaged. Please stop the cycle and wait until the child is of age to pull your little Jesus snake oil scheme.
