Hey SeaGoon. You're one of the Christians who's fun to discuss with. Enjoyed reading your posts while in lurk mode.
Originally posted by Seagoon
In the bible the "fear of the Lord" that a God-fearing individual has is not a reference to a kind of craven or cowed fear that someone would feel towards a tyrant or a brutal thug. The fear of the Lord in the Bible is more the feeling of respect, awe, reverence, and honor that a son should feel towards a strong father.
That's respect, not fear. While to some it may be a matter of semantics, I don't think it is.
To use a real life example: I respect the canopy I am flying. It's very small, high performance and it can do incredible things. It can also turn around and bite me on the ass. Spin up for seemingly no reason. It's ground hungry and throws a lot of altitude in a turn.
Had I feared the canopy, I would not be jumping it. There is a certain element of fear involved yes, but it is not the main thing giving "authority".
The G-man is my main man. He knows a lot of cool tricks and I wouldn't want to piss him off. But I don't fear him as such because what sets of his anger is behaviour I find morally wrong and thus try to avoid. We're pretty much in agreement there, me and 'im.
The relationship is pretty clear: he is inifinitely much more powerful than me and could turn me into a toad if he wanted to. He won't do it unless he feels he needs to (I hope). So, perhaps I should fear that, but I don't. Can't stop it if he decides to on a whim. I trust 'im to be more fair than that.
And, even with all his power, I still got free will ya know? So, as long as I am ready to accept all the consequences of my actions - he really cannot stop me. That would be against his own essence. If he follows the rules. No one knows if he does, though some claim to have knowledge of a) his intention to follow the rules and b) what the rules actually are. So he could stop me. Maybe. Who knows. It's not massively important anyway. I do my thing and then we see how things turn out.
Anyway, so we have this massively powerful benign deity who quite obviously has a huge amount of humor (see Boy Bands for instance, or the way our eyes evolved). The dude is gonna forgive most mistakes I make, as long as they are just that - mistakes, and as long as I strive to improve myself. And I have this Free Will thing. Which is really a nifty thing to have. So we have this relationship right? He chills out and if I do something he disapproves of, he can fry my arse in a variety of ways. On the other hand, as long as I am ready to accept the consequences of my actions, I can do whatever I want. No stopping me from his side, he's cool with that.
What does stop me from randomly walking around killing people is not so much the threat of eternal damnation (from which I am sure some fear could spring), but rather my internal moral compass. Perhaps his test to me is to see how well I can align my actions with my internal compass - and how my internal compass is aligned to his house rules. Maybe I get to know this some time, maybe I don't.
So, respect is in order. But my actions are not guided by fear of godly punishment, but rather by my own morals. Religious people sometimes are quick to suggest that it is of divine origin but that the owner can corrupt it. I don't know, so I will just say it's possible it is and it's possible it's not, because that's a whole other discussion.
As far as the Bible goes, I think Jesus himself would be pretty upset about how the King James bible came to be. Selective editing? What about all the stuff that was left out? I mean, c'mon, there were lots of people writing about the guy who got nailed up because he asked us to be nice to each other. History is written by the winners, and what we have today is the Winner's Bible Version. In other words, Free Will in action again. My guess is the G-man is chuckling at all this and mumbling "no no no my children, that wasn't what I meant!". Though many of us are misguided, I feel that those who proclaim to have the answers is more so than others. This is not directed at religions as such, but more of a general observation of mine.
The Bible says fear the G-man. My internal compass says respect the dude.
