Hey, hambydammit! What a moron you are... You didn't read the verses carefully enough.

Don't you see? Perfect love casteth out fear... that means that before you become a Christian, you fear god because if you don't believe in him, you'll go to hell, so you're afraid. Then, when you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior, the Holy Spirit comes down to you and fills you with perfect love, and you no longer have any fear.

Get it? You only have a need to fear God before you become a Christian, then all fear is removed.

You big dummy! You must confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the only way to be saved. It says so in the Bible. Believing is not enough. You must pray to Jesus to save you. So when you believe in God, there is fear in your heart until you accept him into your life as your personal Lord and Savior, and then the Holy Spirit fills you with perfect love. So it does make sense, after all.

You're thinking too literally, hambydammit. You have to realize that there is spiritual love and physical love, and there is the fear of god, and earthly fear.

You can't understand the love of God because it is transcendent, and doesn't conform to the standards of human love. It is the same with any other emotion. We can't hold God to earthly standards. What this passage means is that all spiritual fear leaves us when we become saved. We all have an innate knowledge of God, and our spirit knows the words that he has written on our hearts. Whether on a conscious level or not, we all fear god before we have come to know him because he has written his word on our hearts, and if we're living in sin, our spirit is sick, and is in fear. When we are saved, there is no more fear. Our humanity can fear, but that is the fear of the flesh, and is transient. In heaven there will be no more fear of God because we will all be made perfect by the cleansing of our spirits by the Holy Spirit. While we are on earth, we will still experience human emotions because even though we are made "spiritually" perfect when we accept Jesus Christ as our Personal Lord and Savior.

What?

That doesn't make any sense. A minute ago, you told me that we were talking about fear. You didn't mention "spiritual fear" until I completely trashed your argument and forced you into taking it to some metaphysical level. That's just a trick of word play to let you get out of admitting that the bible can't even figure out what it is saying, which means that either A) God doesn't know what he's talking about, or B) God didn't care to give us an accurate description of what it is he expects from us.

If it's A, then you're screwed because god isn't perfect, and the whole thing collapses. If it's B, then god's a dick, because he could have given us a perfect book instead of giving us one that was supposed to be perfect, but was completely fucked logically.

How are we atheists supposed to believe in this bastard if he won't even throw us one bone? If we could demonstrate that the bible is perfect, that would be a pretty good evidence that maybe there was something to it. But it's so far from perfect, it leads us to believe the obvious truth: The bible is flawed, God is impossible as described therein, and you are full of crap and don't even realize it.

So, you're not even going to address those other obvious flaws in the bible?

I know it doesn't matter much, because if there's one error, there might as well be ten thousand. It still goes back to the fact that if God didn't feel like giving us a perfect book, and then he's going to claim it's a perfect book, then he's a damn liar anyway.