How Christians and there god sound to me.

[CliveStaples]

Well that's your/your churches interpretation of it anyway.

Uh, no, that's just the first thing that came into my head when I was trying to think of a rival account of the Proverbs passage.

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Insufficient, and honestly no different than orienting your life around thinking that you've got it all figured out (we'd just be assuming that someone else has it all figured out). If the lord could cobble together a reasonable explanation for anything then it wouldn't be the lord doing the changing or the leading, it would be the reasonable explanation.

I don't think this is very persuasive. People are always going to be lead by their own understanding about God. Abraham decided to sacrifice his son based on his understanding of God's command. On the account I described, that's not the kind of thing Proverbs is saying you shouldn't do. In fact, it's exactly the kind of thing Proverbs is saying you should do: if your own understanding of X makes you inclined to do Y, but your understanding of God is such that you think that God would want you to do Z, then you should do Z.

For example, my understanding of premarital sex might lead me to think, "Sure, it's cool, as long as nobody gets sick or pregnant." But in order to lead a godly life, I can't do what I might otherwise want to do in light of my understanding of God's will for me.

All of this leads me to wondering why we can't trust the words on the page to mean what they say? Why didn't the text simply read......

-"Don't think that you've got everything figured out already. Be willing to be changed/lead by the Lord"-

Why isn't that what we find in the black and white? I mean sure, that's clearly what some may want it to mean, but who's offering the wisdom in this scenario, the lowly human or the god? When it's all said and done it's just a proverb, a saying of men. We say silly things sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, why wasn't it written in English? Why'd they write it in Hebrew? Why didn't they use 21st century English idioms so that we could more easily understand it?

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That...that actually sounds pretty accurate. The problem then being, how do you take guidance from god? Rather than trying to figure things out for yourself, you let god figure them out for you. Ironically, it is the theists who oftentimes think they have it all figured out. We don't know how the big bang was set off, claiming it is god, and filling in 'goddidit' in the answer for everything you aren't sure about is more harmful than leaning on human understanding and admitting that you don't know. Consider all of the scientific progress that has occurred up until this point and ask youself if we would be this far if we hadn't leaned on human reason and instead had asked god to make these discoveries.

But God doesn't "figure things out for you". That's just a strawman that people have crafted because they want to conclude "lol xtians don't exercise critical judgment."

What specifically in this passage leads you to conclude that the text instructs believers to 'let God figure things out' for them?

Now if by "be willing to be changed/led" you mean that god comes to us to guide us, on occasion, I must ask when he ever did this. Ordereing genocides or making decrees, sure, but imarpting knowledge? Not so much. (This all assuming he actually existed)

You're just asking about the agency of God. Typically examples (e.g., anecdotal evidence) are automatically dismissed precisely because they would entail that God actually acted in the world. So I don't know what kind of evidence you would actually even possibly accept.