In Watership Down, the infamous General Woundwort calls to his fleeing rabbit troop, “Come back, you fools!  Dogs aren’t dangerous!  Come back and fight!”  For some reason, that came to mind when I read the following article.

Of course, dogs ARE dangerous to rabbits, and bears are dangerous, too.  It would be a fool who fights a bear without need and without weapons.

But Eric apparently lives near a lot of bears, and he rightly says, “Fear of bears should be very far down on our list of phobias.”

A culture of death! We need not fear bears. We need rather to fear that which destroys our ability to cherish life and fear God. The fear of God breeds reverence for life and clarity of vision—the sense of awe at God’s beauty that moves us to live clean, constructive, peaceful, gentle lives. How desperately we need to spread the message of Jesus, the only antidote for our culture of death. “I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly”(John 10:10).

A good read, a great point.  I hope you’ll click through and read it all.  Here in Britain, we have so many obscure dangers which we guard against, while turning a blind eye to the things that are destroying so many lives in our society.

It also reminded me of the following from our Saviour.  He was talking about persecution, but the principal is broader — we worry about obscure temporal dangers and ignore the much more common eternal ones.

Matthew 10:28

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.