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