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moakley
SFN Regular
USA
1888 Posts |
 Posted - 07/11/2002 : 20:43:06
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During the past few weeks I have simply been a reader of this forum. Limited to just the active threads during that time. It is clear that many of the regular particpant possess a good deal of knowledge on the history of religion.
Is there a point in time when the word fear, as in "Fear of God", had its definition changed to include reverence, awe, respectful dread ?
Having read the bible, in particular the old testemant, "Fear of God" clearly had to mean to be afraid of. Or is it that having 42 childern killed by bears for teasing a bald priest is a good thing ?
Thanks, MO
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Trish
SFN Addict
USA
2102 Posts |
 Posted - 07/11/2002 : 23:28:07 [Permalink]
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'Fear of Gawd' meaning awe and respect is probably a result of apologetics. Apologeticists tend to rewrite the meaning of words and so on to make their preferred religion seem less harsh than it was originally written. This probably came about with the 'gentling' of xianity over the last 100 years or so - a big time for apologetics.
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...no one has ever found a 4.5 billion year old stone artifact (at the right geological stratum) with the words "Made by God."
No Sense of Obligation by Matt Young |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 07/12/2002 : 05:40:09 [Permalink]
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Like Trish said, and Slater can expound upon this (if he is of a mind), as he's mentioned it before in detail, but my understanding is that up until about 200 years ago, "fear of God" was all there was.
There was no kind, loving God/Jesus of Christianity as we hear about it today. It wasn't until the Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Humanist movements that Christianity saw that this was a much better deal than what they'd been preaching for the last 1500 years: God is angry, vengeful, and jealous, and you'd better do as we say or you'll burn in hell in excruciating pain through all of eternity, (and we can have the power to send you there no matter what you do)!
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You can tell she's hydrolic...
Her silver scream is supersonic
You can see the mercury smear in her eye... |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 07/12/2002 : 09:51:41 [Permalink]
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Yeah, that's pretty much it in a nut shell.
The original (post Nicaea) Christianity was horrible. A fact that the church recognized right away and amended. The problem was with heaven and hell. Jews, of course, don't actually believe in heaven and hell-that comes from Mithraism. But they combined Zoroaster's afterlife with the Dionysian Elisha and Tartarus. So now instead of being sent to suffer in the terrible Persian Hell until you had paid for your sins you were sent there forever. The early church was set up on military grounds and this didn't sound too bad to them. The problem they didn't consider was infant mortality and postpartum depression. With the souls of their babies being sent straight to the fires of hell it became common practice for mothers to commit suicide to join their new borns in the pit. So the church came up with Limbo to try to save the mother's lives.
Then they found the problem of 'since you would be sent to Hell forever for a minor infraction or a major one-why not commit the major one?' The threat of punishment was so incredibly severe that instead of controlling the population it had the opposite effect. The answer to this was Purgatory.
People were not allowed to read, let alone own, bibles. Only the clergy could have them. Most of what Jesus talks about, when he talks about an afterlife is HELL. You really weren't supposed to pray directly to Jesus anyway-he was above your station, and he already knew everything there was to know. (Of course you still had to confess all you sins of thought, word and deed to a government appointed priest even though Jesus already knew them the powers that be didn't) So everyone prayed to Mary to, in effect, protect them from Jesus. Mary is based on the Celtic (Galatian) triune goddess Mary, or as she was called in the west Brig (Brigit). Every cathedral that was built in Europe in the middle ages was dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
When the church fell apart from it's own weight and corruption a form of the Greek philosophy of Humanism was reborn. The strange new concept that people actually had intrinsic value.
But at the very same time Protestantism started up with the concept that Christianity should go back to it's roots. They proceeded to abandon all of the "fixes" the church had made over the years and went back to the very darkest period of the dark ages.
Humanism however has many self-evident virtues and was never abandoned by the intellectuals, which lead to what is known as the Enlightenment. Many of the leaders in the Enlightenment abandoned Christianity for Unitarianism, which we now call Deism. The idea that humans had merit lead to all sorts of changes. Age old social systems like monarchies and slavery were over thrown.
About the mid 1700's Catholics and main stream Protestants start having Humanistic ideas show up in their literature for the first time. There are some minor bits of Jesus's sayings that can be reinterpreted to reflect the now popular Humanistic values. The Neo-Dark Age Protestants protest this change. They ignore the fact that Catholicism is the oldest Christian sect and start claiming that it is a cult and that main stream Protestants have lost their way and aren't real Christians.
Nowhere can the original Christian anti-humanism be seen more clearly that in the American bible belt-or to use their previous nick name, the slave states. While members of the Enlightenment used the apologetically reinterpreted quotes of Jesus to argue against slavery these people used the bible to argue in favor of it.
So to answer your question "Is there a point in time when the word fear, as in "Fear of God", had its definition changed to include reverence, awe, respectful dread?" that would depend entirely on where you are. If you were in Florence Italy it would have been in the mid 1500's, New York New York the 1720's, Atlanta Georgia the 1870's, Dayton Tennessee we are still waiting on.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860 |
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