WHY I SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID OF A GOD
"My son fear the Lord and the king. Do not fail to obey either of them for
disaster from them will rise suddenly, and who knows the ruin that will come
from them both?" Proverbs 24.
Being afraid of God means you want something from him. The person who is afraid
of God and who claims to love God is a liar.
If the believer principally wants to purify herself and save herself from Hell
and the loss of God, then what she does for others is rooted in
self-centredness. She thinks she can fool God but a worshipping a stupid version
of God leads to fear. A God who you think cannot see through you is incompetent
and probably harmful. She will get bigoted for she will be afraid of other
people seeing through her too.
I can't change the past. Therefore no god can have the right to punish me. It
would be an injustice for me to suffer for what I cannot change. I do not ask
any gods for pardon. We have to punish because of the world we live in and we
have to sometimes do things that are not very good to prevent things that are
even worse. A law that does not inflict penalties on those who break it is not a
law at all for it doesn't try to deter others from crime. A God of power would
be able to stop evil without using the threat of punishment. We only have to
worry about forgiving ourselves and each other we do it so that we can move on
and have a better and happier future.
We have biological weak spots. We are vulnerable. We
have many weak spots aside that. People who harm us willingly attack
us for they know they will damage us. So we cannot let
something go just because it is in the past. It takes time to
feel safe enough with a person who has harmed us and they need to
earn our trust. God however is not vulnerable so he can simply
let things go and forgive on tap. For a person who thinks God
alone ultimately matters, this can be dangerous. Why? It is
his forgiving that counts the most. His forgiving allows him
to heal your problems with others. Religion rationalises that
if this is not happening then you or they are not responding to his
prompts and grace. All you get from all this is a person doing
harm and then acting as if nothing happened. A forgiveness
that leads to such arrogance is an amnesty. Only a person who
does not truly care what they have done seeks it. It is
something selfish masked as forgiveness. It calls itself
forgiveness and looks like it but it is anything but.
If man has to punish the past, that is because there are good results for
society from dealing with crime. But God has no need to punish us. We cannot
hurt him.
Stockholm syndrome is interesting. You are in a very dangerous situation and
your freedom has been taken from you. You want to feel safe in a terrible
situation so you imagine that any lack of nastiness in the captor is a sign of
love or kindness. You will appreciate it so much that you will not see it for
what it really is. Evil people are never totally horrible but skilfully blend
evil and good together. That serves their dark purpose better. Believers in God
are often just too accepting of the terrible things God does to them. They have
Stockholm syndrome. The fear is still there but they use the seeming good in the
bully like opium to dull the fear and pain.
What is the relationship between love and fear? Does love
inherently involve fear? Does it sow fear that can get worse? Love is said
to
