How Christians and there god sound to me.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

The obvious question becomes, "why is going with whatever god thinks any different than going with whatever you think?" Neither involves an explanation for whatever authority we might wish to go with. In this way they are both entirely similar.

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.

Illustrating the difficulty you alluded to above, your understanding of what god wills is yet another thing "you've got figured out", and we still can't explain why either you -or a god- has anything figured out without elaborating can we?

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?

It -is- written in english. The words we find in english are not a direct translation but an interpretation of what the phrase would mean in our vernacular (direct translations are often unintelligible). If the author wished to express the sentiment you've expressed they could have done so in whatever language they wished, and it would be interpreted in english to be as close as possible to this expression. What you are doing is unlike this, you are translating an expression -in english-...to another expression -in english-. Why this is required at all is the very thing I'm wondering. Even after we go through the trouble of this double dipping interpretation we still don't have a very useful statement, the criticism of the first applies as equally to the second.

(ignoring this entirely - would it be so unreasonable to expect that the very important message of a god be easily understood by any person of any culture and any language at any time? I don't think so, but in the case of this particular portion of the text I don't require it to be so, or even expect it to be so...because it's just something that a human being decided to write down one day- and again, we say silly things....)