The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Psalms 111:10).
The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge (Proverbs 1:7).
Behold, the fear of God, that is wisdom (Job 28:28).

The Western world is surely familiar enough with the above quotations from the Bible. These are incredible statements, even if one grants the contention of scripture scholars that the use of the word fear here also connotes awe; in the original Hebrew the word used does mean fear, and is consistently used in that way throughout the Old Testament. Clearly, an essential aspect of the attitude reflected in the Bible towards God is one of fear, if not terror, because of His extreme punishments for disobedience and disrespect that are recorded throughout most of its books. Therefore, we can state that at least in part, the intention expressed in these lines is that only those who fear their Creator can attain a state of wisdom and knowledge, and that such fear is indeed a desired and even holy state, and an integral part of the spiritual path. Some questions, however, are immediately raised:

1. What kind of mind could have had such a thought?

2. How is it that that thought resonates so clearly with the biblical audience, then and now?

3. Why is it today that sermons are still given in temples and churches throughout the world on this theme?

4. Why are children still being brought up with the idea that to fear God is a good thing?

In this article, we shall answer these questions and explore why this idea has held such prominence throughout the ages in many religions and by so many people. Second, we shall discuss how, because of this fear of God, true and loving compassion towards others is impossible. This will remain the case unless this underlying fear is first exposed and then let go through forgiveness.

The god that the Bible portrays is a person, an individual made -- to reverse the biblical phrase (Genesis 2:26) -- in the "image and likeness" of man, who then demands that he be worshiped in a specific way because he is, after all, a jealous god (Exodus 20:5). Moreover, he is a god who becomes angry and wrathful when his commandments and statutes are not kept. Interestingly enough, many of these same traits are an integral part of the pantheon of gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. Yet because we consider these divine figures to be mythological, we are entertained and amused as we read of their adolescent antics, puerile pranks, and childish temper tantrums. Not so with the events described in the Bible, however, which is believed by the faithful to be the inspired word of God, and therefore not to be questioned but accepted as the truth.

A study of the psychology of A Course in Miracles would help clarify that the above traits are a projection of the split mind that aligned itself with the ego thought system. Furthermore, this projection has led many world religions -- certainly the biblical ones -- to include these traits in their design of a creator-God. And so the idea of a jealous, angry, and punishing deity has been enshrined in the pages of the "sacred" biblical texts for close to three thousand years. And yet relatively few have asked, "How can this be?" Obviously, since these ego traits have been exhibited in almost all of humanity since the dawn of existence, it should come as no surprise that the seeming creator of these creatures must share in the same unhappy aspects of what it means to be human. For how could it not be so? It must be that the writers of the scriptural books project their own unconscious characteristics onto the characters they are writing about, much as playwrights and novelists are always writing about themselves, and nocturnal dreamers fill their dreams with split-off parts of their own selves.

Our unconscious role in all this is forgotten, however, and we simply end up believing that our made-up projections are reality. Thus it is that the projected God is seen to be a real and objective figure that needs to be reckoned with. Therefore, if people are brought up believing that the biblical deity is fearful because of all the traits he exhibits in his relationship with his creatures, attested to by the stories told in the Bible, it stands to reason that they must also believe that the only way they can acquire wisdom or knowledge -- that must reflect the divine -- is to embrace an attitude of fear. At the very least, they hope that their actions will not offend the omnipotent, irrational, and greatly feared god, and spur him on even further to vengeance and wrathful punishment.

The time has come, and is truly past due, for humanity to drop all such notions about the Godhead, since we can certainly observe the effects throughout history of keeping such a notion of God in our consciousness. These images of the divine have not been uplifting, have not fostered any true advance of consciousness, nor have they brought love and forgiveness to our relationships with each other. In fact, the results of such a theology have been quite destructive, if we look clearly and without denial at the pages of history, and trace the course of our oftimes convoluted and ambivalent mythologies.

To paraphrase a term from the years of "Reaganomics," we may speak of the deleterious effects of trickle-down theology. For example, there is the belief that one could be singled out by God to be one of his chosen or special ones -- whether an individual (a prophet, an apostle, or Jesus himself) or entire groups (the children of Israel, Christians, or priests). This can only lead to an attitude of arrogance, since the believers will inevitably think of themselves as justified in feeling superior, since God has bestowed a special gift on them, and not on others. The ugly fruits of such specialness are many: For example, John Calvin, the highly influential Protestant reformer, promoted the idea that those who are favored by God are easily recognizable by their good economic position, and that God preordained only a certain number of people for salvation. Also, many Jews and Christians have developed an unseemly sense of pride, because they believe they are better and more enlightened than other groups, and are actually living in a state of grace because they follow what they believe to be the laws of God. In truth, of course, these are really the laws that people made up to worship God, but, again, forgetting what they had done, they now believe that the various commandments and statutes are God's holy word, to be obeyed without question. Human beings constantly impute to God or the gods the hallucinations of a disturbed mind. Unfortunately, this serious malady of disordered or deranged thinking has been tolerated for thousands of years.

A Course in Miracles, on the other hand, announces the dawning of a new era, a time period that contains a new paradigm for living. In its pages the Love of the true, living God is reflected for us as we learn that our Creator and Source cannot be known in a state of fear, and that wisdom and knowledge, which are truly of God, remain hidden to a split mind that is dreaming a dream of fear, which Jesus tells us is our state of mind until we awaken.

The God that Jesus teaches us about in A Course in Miracles is not a person nor an individual, even though in the Course he uses the traditional words Father and Creator. Such usage is for our comfort, because the non-dualistic truth would be too alarming for us who believe that we are concrete, specific, and separated individuals. As he explains to us in the text:

Since you believe that you are separate, Heaven presents itself to you as separate, too. Not that it is in truth, but that the link that has been given you to join the truth may reach to you through what you understand. Father and Son and Holy Spirit are as One, as all your brothers join as one in truth. ...It is the Holy Spirit's function to teach you how this oneness is experienced....

All this [the Holy Spirit's teaching of forgiveness] takes note of time and place as if they were discrete, for while you think that part of you is separate, the concept of a oneness joined as one is meaningless. … Yet must It [our Teacher] use the language that this mind can understand, in the condition in which it thinks it is. And It must use all learning to transfer illusions to the truth, taking all false ideas of what you are, and leading you beyond them to the truth that is beyond them (T-25.I.5:1-3; 6:4–7:1,4-5).

Indeed, God is the Source of all that is unseen, which is a non-dualistic totality -- what the Course calls reality -- and which, again, cannot be understood by a dualistic brain that has been programmed by the ego mind not to understand:

When you made visible what is not true, what is true became invisible to you. … Yet it is no more up to you to decide what is visible and what is invisible. … The definition of reality is God's, not yours. He created it, and He knows what it is. You who knew have forgotten ... (T-12.VIII.3:1,4,6-8).

We can therefore apprehend from Jesus' teachings in A Course in Miracles that God is pure mind, pure spirit, and the Source of all being, and that Christ, our true Identity, is an Idea -- also pure mind and spirit -- in the Mind of God. Jesus is quite deliberate when he talks about creation having nothing to do with the material world, because God did not create the physical universe, the world of perception: matter, specifics, individuality, creatures such as homo sapiens or any other specific form in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms. As Jesus tells us in two places:

God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning (T-25.III.2:1).

The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end (C-4.1).

Moreover, regarding the oneness of Heaven, we are taught:

God shares His Fatherhood with you who are His Son, for He makes no distinctions in what is Himself and what is still Himself. What He creates is not apart from Him, and nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him (W-pI.132.12:3-4).

Stated another way, the God that A Course in Miracles presents to us is Divine Abstraction, formless, non-specific, a totality of Love, a Source which encompasses all being within Itself and that, to say it one more time, cannot be understood by our sleeping, dualistic selves:

Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind. … The mind that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all-encompassing (W-pI.161.2:1; 4:7).

It therefore goes without saying that the true God, being pure abstract Love, is the exact antithesis of the biblical god, whose ego characteristics we have already described. In part to correct the belief system that is presented in the New Testament, Jesus included the following important passage in A Course in Miracles:

Persecution frequently results in an attempt to "justify" the terrible misperception that God Himself persecuted His Own Son on behalf of salvation. The very words are meaningless. It has been particularly difficult to overcome this because, although the error itself is no harder to correct than any other, many have been unwilling to give it up in view of its prominent value as a defense. In milder forms a parent says, "This hurts me more than it hurts you," and feels exonerated in beating a child. Can you believe our Father really thinks this way? It is so essential that all such thinking be dispelled that we must be sure that nothing of this kind remains in your mind (T-3.I.2:4-9).

Obviously, Jesus is pleading with us in the above quotation, as he does many other times in A Course in Miracles, to look at our beliefs and examine our theology about the nature of God and what we really feel about our Source, since this trickle-down effect is all-pervasive and quite insidious in its results. The two-thousand-year history of Western civilization, and for that matter all of history, with its killing, torture, wars, and abominations, certainly bears witness to an unsurpassed cruelty that seems inherent in all members of homo sapiens. Moreover, many of these bloody wars were indeed fought in the name of God, as were the tortures and witch-burnings that tragically have been such an integral part of Christian history.

Modern psychology has given us the tools whereby to understand the dilemmas of human existence caused by the unconscious psyche of human beings. And A Course in Miracles picks up where psychology has left off. In his Course, Jesus identifies the unconscious thoughts that lead to brutality, equating them with the belief and thought that we could become separated from our Source, annihilate our Creator, and become self-created and make a world "the opposite of Heaven" (T-16.V.3:6). This "tiny, mad idea" (T-27.VIII.6:2) spawned the split mind, part of which contained the ideas of sin, guilt, and fear. Furthermore, Jesus teaches us that consciousness is the domain of the ego, and "was the first split introduced into the mind" after the thought of separation seemed to occur (T-3.IV.2:1). Denial of sin, guilt, and fear means that these thoughts are placed out of awareness, or put into the unconscious. Once they are repressed, they are inevitably projected out of the mind, either onto our own bodies (sickness) or onto another's (anger and attack). So it should come as no surprise that if part of our mind -- what A Course in Miracles calls the wrong mind or the ego -- believes that it has destroyed God, the Source of all Love, and made up a world that is an attack on Him (W-pII.3.2:1), that world must consist of sin, guilt, fear, hatred, and viciousness. Of this condition of the opposite of Heaven, world history unhappily provides ongoing witness without end. On and on throughout the centuries, the ego thought system has played out different scenarios of victim and victimizer, of blame, hatred, usurpation, and murder. And being caught up in it, the dream figures we think of as ourselves have made a god in their own image and likeness, and then have proceeded to worship and fear this bizarre creator that is really their own miscreation.

We can now answer the four questions presented in the first paragraph of this article:

1) What kind of mind could have had such a thought (the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom)?

A split mind that has embraced the ego thought system would constantly experience the emotion of fear, since the thought of separation from God was intended specifically to make an opposite to love, which of course is fear. Therefore, the part of the split mind wherein the thought system of the ego dominates is always in a state of unconscious fear, although the person might consciously have pleasant experiences. Meanwhile, the unconscious hell still brews in the mind that has embraced these thoughts, which explains the utter violence and ferocity of humanity's thoughts and actions in this collective dream we call life.

2) How is it that that thought resonates so clearly with the biblical audience, then and now?

Obviously, part of the split mind, which contains the thought of annihilating God, must live in constant terror in the belief that it has accomplished its goal. This mind then only experiences the specific and concrete -- fear and hate -- therefore proving that God is non-existent since God is abstract (i.e., non-specific) love. The ego thought system of the world continues its development by making up a god who has the same emotions as the dream figures we call human beings, because people are comfortable with such an omnipotent authority figure that mirrors their own unconscious ego. And so when individuals in past times had read the tales of God, the prophets, the Children of Israel, and Jesus and his apostles, they reinforced for them the unconscious thought system of specialness with which they were so identified. Likewise today, the same stories find an equally receptive audience in those who still seek to prove that their thought system of separation and individuality is the correct one, while the reality of Heaven's oneness is a lie.

3) Why is it today that sermons are still given in temples and churches throughout the world on this theme?

Our answer is a continuation of the previous one. We must understand the satisfaction that the ego obtains from having us believe that we must supplicate and placate an inconsistent god, who loves one minute, and murders the next. Absolute rulers have used this ego need well by having religions align themselves with the totalitarian rule of the state, and using the fear of God as a weapon against people who might question such a fearful dictatorship or deity. Religious leaders obtained great followings in the past, and continue to do so in the present, by talking about sin, hell, damnation, and fear, and how our so-called disobedience to the ego-made god can be absolved by their intervention, or the intervention of some holy figure that they espouse. The God business in the ego thought system is big business, and as long as people believe they will be punished by the alien god-figure that religion portrays, the churches and temples will continue to present sermons about this god. In the end, it is our individuality that is the victor -- that special self of the religious leaders as well as of their followers -- and our reality as Christ that is seemingly vanquished and lost to our awareness.

4) Why are children still brought up today to believe that fearing God is a good thing?

Since the purpose of the ego's thought system of individuality and hate is always to perpetuate itself, then this motivation is reflected here within the dream by having parents seek to inculcate in their children the self-same belief system that has sustained them. Jesus emphasizes in A Course in Miracles that as we teach, so do we learn, for we are reinforcing the thought system -- the Holy Spirit's or the ego's -- we have first made real in our own minds. And so those people who are parents, seeking to reinforce their own individual existence -- part of this identified with their roles as parents -- will inevitably therefore teach their children the ego thought system of sin, guilt, and fear that they, the parents, wish to learn and reinforce about themselves.

Given all that we have been discussing about the fear of God, it stands to reason that followers of this strange biblical god, born of their need to reinforce and preserve their individual and special identities, could hardly be truly compassionate towards others. After all, in their belief system, God's compassion is limited to his chosen ones, his favorites, and so why should theirs not be as well? Therefore, unless belief is withdrawn from this image of a feared and punishing god, and the trickle-down consequences of such belief, a new paradigm cannot be born into the consciousness of the people. And so, we are compelled to repeat the same dysfunctional patterns of selfishness and hate -- over and over again -- that make societies and civilization what they are, and which leave humanity hopeless and despairing of any real change, with true compassion remaining but an unrealistic dream.

Indeed, throughout history, many attempts have been made to form groups or organizations that address society's ills, demonstrating what appears to be a more responsible and compassionate attitude. However, as noble as their missions have been and continue to be, they never obtained mass support, nor did they succeed in elevating the mass consciousness to compassion. Yet how could they succeed when the underlying thought system of the ego, along with its vengeful god, was never truly addressed, either in the world they were trying to help, or in the group members themselves, the helpers? That is why Jesus issues this caution, well known to most students of A Course in Miracles: "Trust not your good intentions. They are not enough" (T-18.IV.2:1-2). As we are reminded throughout the Course, expressions of love are impossible without first removing -- with the Holy Spirit's help -- the ego thoughts that block such expression. We quote only one of many such reminders:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false (T-16.IV.6:1-2).

The clear implication here is that before we would seek to undertake an act of compassion, we first would have to ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help in undoing all the ego blocks that interfere with our having an attitude of compassion, the obvious precursor to any loving and caring action. Indeed, it is the content of compassion that must be universally applied, since within the world, the forms in which compassion is expressed are obviously limited. Interestingly enough, even though the concept of compassion towards all is an integral part of Jesus' message to us in A Course in Miracles, the word itself appears only once, in a passage that relates directly to the fear of God:

To look upon the fear of God does need some preparation. Only the sane can look on stark insanity and raving madness with pity and compassion, but not with fear. For only if they share in it does it seem fearful, and you do share in it until you look upon your brother with perfect faith and love and tenderness (T-19.IV-D.11:1-3).

In other words, as long as we identify with the ego thought system of separation and individuality, of sin, guilt, and the fear of God -- all part of one insane package -- then true compassion, born of the unified perception of God's one Son, is impossible. Along the same lines, Jesus teaches us early in the text about the impossibility of love in his world because of our ego-identification:

You who identify with your ego cannot believe God loves you. You do not love what you made, and what you made does not love you. Being made out of the denial of the Father, the ego has no allegiance to its maker. You cannot conceive of the real relationship that exists between God and His creations because of your hatred for the self you made. You project onto the ego the decision to separate, and this conflicts with the love you feel for the ego because you made it. No love in this world is without this ambivalence, and since no ego has experienced love without ambivalence the concept is beyond its understanding. Love will enter immediately into any mind that truly wants it, but it must want it truly. This means that it wants it without ambivalence, and this kind of wanting is wholly without the ego's "drive to get" (T-4.III.4; italics ours).

If we are unable to accept love for ourselves, there is no way we can love all those who are a part of our true Self. Only the shift in thought systems from the ego's fear and hate to the Holy Spirit's forgiveness and love can bring about true compassion for "everyone who wanders in the world uncertain, lonely, and in constant fear" (T-31.VIII.7:1). The key word here is everyone, for if compassionate love is true, it must embrace the entire Sonship, without exception. Indeed, when our compassion is limited to special groups or special individuals, expressed at special times and in special circumstances, it is always the telltale sign that our ego's unconscious thought system of separation and specialness has once more reared its ugly head, in remembrance of its vengeful and punishing god. As we are instructed about the ego's use of empathy, a synonym for compassion:

The clearest proof that empathy as the ego uses it is destructive lies in the fact that it is applied only to certain types of problems and in certain people. These it selects out, and joins with. And it never joins except to strengthen itself (T-16.I.2:1-3).

When the red flag of our judgment and specialness is thus waved before our eyes, our single responsibility is to go to the One who knows only of compassion, asking that His vision of God and His Son replace our own. He would teach us that compassion is justified for every seemingly separated fragment of the Sonship, for all of us believe that we are miserable sinners, doomed to suffer certain destruction at the wrathful hands of a vengeful god. Thus are we all one within the ego system -- without exception -- and this recognition is the prerequisite for remembering at last that we are one as Christ. By learning, therefore, that God loves all His children equally and as one, we are inspired to reflect that love through our compassionate attitude for victim and victimizer alike: the poor, the rich; the good, the bad; the powerless, the powerful. Only then can we know our true Identity -- shared with all -- as God's one Son, the Christ He created one with Him.