Fear makes you blind.

Fear makes you impulsive.

Fear prevents you from thinking logically (or thinking straight).

Off course fear is also protecting you from potential dangers such as of a lion or snake. But those fears are not uniques to human but rather almost universal in animal kingdom. The unique thing for the human is the reason and if you consider yourself wiser than other animals, you have to give credit to your reasoning power over your fears. Or worse, the same fear, if unfounded, will makes you a pathologic case of phobic disorders, instead of solving your problems. You suffer even more by the fear of the fears (phobophobia)! Fear is the exact antithesis of wisdom but paradoxically fear of god was also prescribed by the original authorities as the real wisdom.

How can that be?

Whenever you see a paradox in a sentence, it usually means the sentence is either censored off the critical part or the sentence is not complete. The paradox no longer exist if you know the bigger picture or context, in other words if you see the full sentence (instead of paradoxic fragments). How can there be a situation, where fear is both antithesis* and yet the path** towards wisdom? What are the missing parts of the sentence? Can you see it?

The mother of all fears is DEATH and your inability to control it. Fear of death make you enjoy the life as much as you can (even at the cost of other people's suffering) because life is short and YOLO. Fear of death makes you to conserve time and become efficient. Fear of death makes you to look for shortcuts and loopholes to bypass the obstacles, instead of dealing with issues sincerely. Fear of death makes you insecure and you seek security by marriage (either for partner's support or for a baby as future generation because you know you will not live or be healthy forever), friendship, or property. Fear (biggest fear of all is death) is driving your life, whether you acknowledge it or not. Unless you recognize this, fear will dominate your life, and you will be far away from wisdom.

When a religious preacher bases his argument by intimidating of, or by invoking death / eternal hell, and consequently, if the listener formulates his worldview based only on the fear of death as a model of achieving "true wisdom", they fail to see the other half of it (where fear is antithesis of wisdom) and missing the full picture. They are missing the equally crucial other half (not to fear in pursuit of the Truth). On the contrary, if you based your theology purely based on reason (before you achieved wisdom), it will take you no where and you will be thrown into a full blown existential/nihilistic crisis from you might never recover!

Half of anything cannot be the whole and fear (or death) based theology is bound to be lame and blind, unless you simultaneously see the reason NOT to be fearful in pursuit of the Truth. Only then, these two will complement each other to make the fragmented part into One complete worldview and the paradox will disappear between reason (based on wisdom) vs. faith (based on fear).