I don't quite understand how being forced to fear a celestial dictator leads to love for my fellow man. Surely I don't need the former to be able to incorporate the latter.
I'm sure this has started a pissing match further down, but this is an old Christopher hithchens meme that has had some really good responses/rebuttals. Youtube will supply if one is interested. Hitchens was obsessed with Orwell, and smelled a dictator and a "ministry of love" (1984) even where it did not exist. Consequently he was strong on the libertarian principle, but really poor on the "just authority" principle. He lacked considerable nuance in discerning how hierarchy was just- what amounted to tyranny, servility, rebellion, and remissness. The right integration of these is wisdom- not advocating either without their right relations.
Considering the "argument" in this:
First, Dictators don't create, sustain, reveal to, redeem, or resurrect what they rule.
Second, dictaors don't rule in accordance with true justice. The Biblical claim is not that God makes arbitrary demands. It is that we create arbitrary values and moralities, and call them just, while suppressing our deep knowledge of true justice. God calls this "idolatry". His 'dictatorship' is that he dictates true justice- both deliberative and distributive. We claim he is hidden or should not allow suffering because his process seems to re-establish justivce WHILE simultaniously offering mercy to the very rebels that deserve just punishment. This makes an indescribable mess that could not be otherwise. (God's omnipotence doesn't mean he can do what is logically impossible- like make a 4 sided triangle or a married bachelor). Thus something you can "imagine" may not be logically possible, and God would not be obligated to do it, even if it met the other criteria for a good action.
Third, the Classical and Christian definition of Love is to "commit oneself to the true good of another." Thus in classical thougth and Christian, one needs to start with a view of human nature and human flourishing in order to know what love is. It starts instinctively with "loving your neighbor as yourself", but the non-hypocricy principle is only the baseline. The Golden rule "do to others as you would have them do to you", is universal, but it is not righteousness, justice, or moral maturity. Since, if I like a particular action that is wrong, I may encourage another to do it, or facilitate it, and be "obeying the Golden rule".
Fourth, thus, the scriptural statements being criticiszed above are part of a library of books (bible) that explains wisdom, since wisdom is the practical knowledge of what really amounts to love- the act that is truly in another's deep, everlasting interest. If this is true, then the "fear of the Lord" is the first step in attaining that body of understanding. To "fear the Lord" means to have a sense of the moral gravity of his being, presence and reality- so that you find humility and attentiveness to what he is trying to tell us (see Is a 66:1-3). Anyone that doesn't start with that insight and sense of divine "weightiness" won't see the everlasting timeline, our relation to our creator, our self-justifying tendencies, the real costs and reverbirations of our wrong acts and so on. Such an outlook, according to scripture, cannot assemble a body of wisdom with true structural integrity.
Thus, the christian claim may be wrong (maybe such a God doesn't exist), but it is not contradictory or incoherent. The God that rules what he creates and orders is not a dictator any more than a father or a business owner is inherently a dictator because he rules what he has created and is responsible for. We struggle with this because we have no right of "migration". We can't leave the 'country' God rules and get away from him. We feel our life is "ours", and so we should have that right. But this is a failure to have the fear of the Lord- where could you go form his presence? Everywhere, he is there.
Sorry if this got me tweaked. Theological philosophy is my field. I hate to see really smart guys miss the goodness of God because of sayings that sound clever, but as moral philosophy, are 20 inch groups.
