Wit & Attitude Quote by Frank McCourt

McCourt’s sentence has the snap of a jailbreak story: “hell” and “the afterlife” aren’t metaphysical curiosities, they’re shackles. He frames belief as gravity - “held me, kept me down” - borrowing the language of depression and control rather than spiritual longing. That phrasing matters. It recasts doctrine as an internalized policing system, a set of ideas designed to produce compliance by making fear feel like conscience.

The pivot, “So now,” is where the emotional temperature spikes. He doesn’t drift into vague skepticism; he declares “contempt,” and not for God but for “the institution of the church.” That distinction is strategic. McCourt is attacking the machinery: the social authority that translates private doubt into public shame, that turns suffering into a moral test and obedience into a virtue. “Institution” is the tell - he’s talking about power, not just belief.

Context sharpens the edge. McCourt, shaped by mid-century Irish Catholicism and the poverty he chronicled in Angela’s Ashes, writes from a world where the church was not a weekend activity but a governing presence in classrooms, homes, and bodies. In that environment, talk of hell functions like a currency of discipline. His “getting rid” of it is less a philosophical conversion than a survival tactic: remove the threat, reclaim the self. The contempt reads as earned, almost protective - an ex-believer’s refusal to let an old fear keep collecting rent in his mind.