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Reader question: Please explain “fear of God”, as in this passage – He was a very naughty child. He never had a father around to really put the fear of God into him. My comments: On surface, it appears that because the child was fatherless, there was no-one around to teach him about God, i.e. to turn him into religious person. Religion, however, may have nothing to do with it. “Never had a father around to really put the fear of God into him” merely means the fatherless child had no-one to control him, no-one to teach him behavioral lessons and no-one to administer the occasional beating for wrongdoing. With no such person around, the child was therefore “naughty”, i.e. he was all play and no work, rash and wild. He climbed trees and rooftops and generally did whatever he wanted to do – never having to look over the shoulder for any authority figure to discipline him. Sounds like a happy childhood to me, I hear you say. I understand. In a way, that is a happy childhood considering the usual alternative but that is not the main point of discussion here. The main point here is the idiom “putting the fear of God into someone”. God, capitalized and singular, suggests that this God is really somebody, I mean, not just any one of those gods people have created, deified and abandoned from time to time. This “God” is Christian, and this “God” is almighty to Christians. | 
