Fearing God

As a child I was taught to fear God. I was told to fear God in many ways, most of which were never explained. God was the fearsome unseen force that people talked about every Sunday. I never understood why I didn’t ever see God. Other people talked about seeing God, or at least seeing the light of God. I never understood why I didn’t hear that much about God on other days of the week, especially if He was that frightening and around all the time.

God, never very well described, was described as keeping an eye on me. Why this was so, I also never understood. Did I have some mark, some disfigurement, some behavior I did not recognize as being bad, that was bad? Maybe I didn’t know what bad, or badness, was?

I was promised that God would punish my misbehaviors of the past, today, and in the future. There was no way to escape having my badness observed as God was all seeing. God was a super policeman with a terrible almighty nightstick.

I was hearing adults, the value setters, the examples, the patterns I was expected to emulate, to follow, say that they feared God. Golly, whatever they had done, it must have been a real doozy!

Even then my brain was a troublemaker.

I knew that I hadn’t done anything especially bad, at least recently. Nothing that I could remember at any rate that would be big enough, as I figured it, to fall into a category big enough to concern God, if God was watching all these grownups and causing them to be fearful. As time passed, I grew confident that as long as I kept my indiscretions to a small size, that God would not be bothered to keep watch on me. I had a solution. Don’t do anything to warrant God’s attention.

I was perfectly sure that before God got involved with any of my misbehaviors, my parents were going to be there first. That alone was terrible enough to contemplate. I knew that Dad had a solution that I didn’t like. I was also fairly sure that when I started pushing the line, and my behavior would begin to be bad enough for God to get involved, that my parents would tell me, give me at least one warning that I was skirting the edge of real trouble.

I couldn’t help it. I had to wonder just what bad things that these grownups had done that would cause them to be so fearful of a super parent-like God? That left me with the careful listening option. See and hear, but not be seen, especially not be seen to be listening.

Of course, all of this was before my awareness of sex and all the permutations that sex brings to social interactions between human beings. I did not know then what I know now.

I know now that my mind was a principal target of a religious belief system demanding acceptance by belief. In other words, believe because we say so. That is a reliance on fear.

Every human social entity, especially those we call religions and churches protects its future continuance through promotion of a false sense of fear. We might not recognize that behavior unless we examine the actions and results in behaviors of members of a cult. What is a cult? An extreme group, or a group with extreme beliefs that magnify the obvious results and make them easy to identify. If nothing exists to fear, something will be, must be invented to fear.

In hundreds of cults scattered across America, the group fears the government in a society which goes out of its way not to interfere with odd ball belief systems, unless there is a clear danger, especially to children. In more mainstream religions we get “original sin” and God is “looking over your shoulder.”

This kind of mind bending escapes government attention because it is too sophisticated for the bureaucratic mind to understand. I’ll translate: don’t create a group of secret police to control people from the outside. Instead create an internal system of mind control that cannot be escaped inside the regulated mind of the group member.

Why else were those adults of my childhood publicly confessing to sin? Obviously they were driven to it by a false sense of fear.

This is the Big Lie of institutional religion. As previously stated, all institutions sooner, or later succumb to the allure of the Big Lie. Big Lies are invaluable, precious beyond price. Big Lies are inexpensive to create, valuable as tools, and are immensely effective. It is much easier to create a Big Lie than it is to actually accomplish something real. The perception is more important than the reality.

Each of us, through the accident of birth, is born into a culture where we grow to maturity. We are forever shaped by that culture. We are a captive of that culture. We are a captive of its belief system. We tend to accept that culture without question. It is right. It is “natural”.

This natural acceptance of our cultural grid leaves us especially vulnerable to Big Lies. Big Lies like a willingness to believe in “original sin”, or that God is looking over our shoulder, or that God has some reason to individually test us. This is the essential component of hubris and egocentricism.

Isn’t it past time to ask if this concept is at all logical?

Do you want to continue to be controlled in this way?

Are you ready to think for yourself?

(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

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