We met this psalm already, numbered 14 in the Book of Psalms. If good things are worth repeating, then foolish people need a reminder to awaken them, set them on their guard.
What is foolishness really? According to the psalmist only 1 “fools say in their hearts there is no God.”
To say something in one’s heart is to believe it, to act as if this assumption were real. So, the fool behaves as of God does not exist. The consequence is corruption and 1 “\they commit abominable acts.”
While it is good to live as if taking the right action depends on us and nobody else. If we feel that way, then it becomes our modus operandi to seek to do the right. This is best for all. But when, taken to the other extreme, it suggests that we’re accountable to no one, we act without restraint when it comes to inflicting hurt and pain on others. So, it’s quite understandable that the psalmist should complain, 4 “Have they no knowledge, these evildoers, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon God?”
Lack of awareness of the other and the other’s needs is a natural consequence of that sense of entitlement which derives when we put ourselves in the place of God. We do this because God is and if we choose to believe otherwise, we might well make up for this lack of faith by imagining that all power belongs to us.
There is a problem then with not believing. We force ourselves into believing something other than what the “believers” profess. We substitute this lack of faith with a brand of unfaith that puts us in the place of the One we refuse to believe in. In other words, the choice not to believe that God is might well take us to the state where we act as if we are God’s place.
And that is dangerous. Indeed, the fool says 1 “there is no God.”