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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

> God-fearing

I rest my case.

Ah, you're probably interpreting that as believers walking in fear all day, which again is not the case (side note: studies show that believers are significantly less anxious on a day to day basis. I would link to one study but there are too many that show this so I'll let you Google it).

"God-fearing" is a very ancient phrasing used by the Israelites to refer to anyone that believes in the God as I've described him, "the unmoved mover", "the God of gods", "the Lord of hosts", etc. The term "fear" is our best English translation of the Hebrew text, but the implication here is that we believe that God is just, not arbitrary, and therefore we can respect and submit to his rule and expect fair treatment. Fear only concretely shows up in our hearts when we choose to disobey him. Those who don't believe in his existence or his justice naturally don't have fear when they disobey him, hence the term.

I hope this helps!

> Ah, you're probably interpreting that as believers walking in fear all day

No, I was referring to the fact that religious people basically have a slave-like mentality [1][2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPD1YGghtDk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eefS0gayKFc

If you think you're not a slave to anything, try just sitting still, not eating or drinking, and seeing if you can truly be free, even free from your own tyrannical desires. Try as you must, you will quickly discover that you are a slave to Thirst. You'll want to spend every waking hour obeying it fully, using every ounce of energy in your body to find water to please Thirst. And if you disobey and don't drink, you will then discover that you are a slave to Fear of Death. You'll be free from Thirst but then completely subjected to Fear of Death, so you'll reorient your whole being to serving Fear and making sure you survive. But let's say you steadfastly desire freedom even from Fear, and if you still don't drink, and then you die, so as to prove a point that you were not even a slave to Fear of Death... we'll know you were a slave to Pride.

And this just strengthens David Foster Wallace's argument: if you're going to be a slave anyway, why not be a slave to the greatest possible thing, Creation itself?

That is a definition of God that is so amorphous that it is completely useless. God is whatever you want it to be in that particular moment. So much so, that there is nothing concrete there.

You are simply living from moment to moment, with no grounding connecting your beliefs aside from your personal desires for them.

He still has a mind we can relate to, like a child can relate to their parent. If you cared to look into Aquinas’ idea of God you’d find many concrete ideas, but he’s describing the spiritual realm so obviously it’s not as concrete as describing a human person... that’s the whole point.

What’s very concrete is what God has revealed to us historically through his people Israel, and through his son’s incarnation. What the church does is try to take these revelations/projections and through reason map out the source.

A tall mountain, or the ocean, are also "fearsome". The cause of fear here is the power differential, which is not itself a bad thing.

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