The Atheist - Agnostic - Non religious thread

Some twenty years ago, while somewhere between not being a christian any more and the realisation that if 99.9999% of all the world's religions that ever existed were invented by mankind then they all were, I made a conscious decision to try and stop using specifically christian expletives. Initially this was simply because as I had come into close contact with several wiccans and new age types whose somewhat clumsy and incongruous use of a stylised re-imagining of pagan expletives (By Jove!) or pronouncement of some prosaic curse in lieu of cussing would leave you wondering if you'd accidentally wandered into an impromptu rehearsal for an Elizabethan play spoken entirely in iambic pentameter. Their gauche attempts to avoid naming a deity they no longer believed in got me thinking. If I too didn't believe in the god of the christians and his begotten son then what is the value in invoking their names in expletive? Is this some slack application of the inane aphorism that there are no atheists in a foxhole, so crying Jesus H Christ! whenever I stubbed my toe automatically revoked my membership of the atheists clique and I was reduced to the rank of indecisive agnostic forevermore? Well, suffice to say, the conclusion I reached was "no", it's just very difficult to undo forty odd years of religious indoctrination, and figures of speech are the hardest thing of all to change. 

Not using them in written language was, and still is, relatively easy especially since all keyboards come equipped with a backspace key.  I'm still prone to typing the occasional "heaven only knows" or "go to hell" ... not that hell is christian word as such, or the concept of heaven is unique to christians, their invocation in this form from the pen of a native English speaker generally is. 

Then, in English there aren't any good alternatives that express exactly the same sentiment and meaning as those do. Of course you can get coarser and throw a "f'ck knows" or "f'ck off" in their stead but you can't bandy those around in polite company. 

But as religious oaths go they are relatively mild and while one must presume the existence of a heaven and/or a hell in order to to use those phrases in a literal sense, that isn't strictly necessary if they are used somewhat more figuratively. One could also argue that my use of them does not require me to believe either place exists, and neither does the person who I am saying it to have to believe that either - the only pact we share is that we both understand what the rebuke means.

In everyday conversation avoiding religious profanity a lot harder, especially when everyone around you is using them and you'd spent the first half of your life as a christian. As I said in t'other thread: "should someone pour a glass of iced water down my back I'm pretty confident that in the tirade of expletive[s] that will inevitably ensue several religious oaths will be uttered" and if I was atheist before that tirade then I'll be an atheist after it too.