96. ANTHROPOMORPHISM

Reza Asian holds degrees from Santa Clara University, Harvard Divinity School, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In his book, God: A Human History, we find these reflections.

“When I was a child, I thought God was a large, powerful old man who lived in the sky — a bigger, stronger version of my father, but with magical powers. I imagined him handsome and grizzled, his long gray hair draped over his broad shoulders. He sat on a throne enwrapped by clouds. When he spoke, his voice boomed through the heavens, especially when he was angry. And he was often angry. But he was also warm and loving, merciful and kind. He laughed when he was happy and cried when he was sad.”

“As I grew older, I left behind most of my childish views. Yet the image of God remained. I was not raised in a particularly religious household, but I was always fascinated by religion and spirituality. … I didn’t want to simply know about God; I wanted to experience God, to feel his presence in my life. Yet when I tried, I couldn’t help but imagine a great chasm opening up between us, with God on one side, me on the other, and no way for either of us to cross over.

“In my teens, I converted from the tepid Islam of my Iranian parents to the zealous Christianity of my American friends. All at once, that childhood urge to think of God as a powerful human being crystallized into the worship of Jesus Christ as literally ‘God made flesh.’ At first, the experience felt like scratching an itch I had had my entire life. For years, I’d been searching for a way to bridge the chasm between me and God. Now, here was a religion that claimed there was no chasm. If I wanted to know what God was like, all I had to do was imagine the most perfect human being.”

“As the famed German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach said, in accounting for the enormous success of Christianity’s conception of God, ‘only a being who comprises in himself the whole man can satisfy the whole man.’ … I first read that Feuerbach quote in college, just around the time I decided to embark on a lifelong quest to study the religions of the world. What Feuerbach seemed to be saying is that the near-universal appeal of a God who looks, and thinks, and feels, and acts just like us is rooted in our deep-seated need to experience the divine as a reflection of ourselves.”

“It turns out that this compulsion to humanize the divine is hardwired in our brains, which is why it has become a central feature in almost every religious tradition the world has known. The very process through which the concept of God arose in human evolution compels us, consciously or not, to fashion God in our own image.”

“This is not to claim that there is no such thing as God, or that what we call God is wholly a human invention. … You either choose to believe that there is something beyond the material realm — something real, something knowable — or you don’t. If, like me, you do, then you must ask yourself another question: Do you wish to experience this thing? Do you wish to commune with it? To know it? If so, then it may help to have a language with which to express what is fundamentally an inexpressible experience.”

“The Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians, the Persians, the Hebrews, the Arabs, all devised their theistic systems in human terms and with human imagery. The same holds true for nontheistic traditions, such as Jainism or Buddhism, both of which conceive of the spirits and devas that populate their theologies as superhuman beings who are, like their human counterparts, bound by the laws of karma.”

“There are, as one can imagine, certain consequences to this natural impulse to humanize the divine. For when we endow God with human attributes, we essentially divinize those attributes, so that everything good or bad about our religions is merely a reflection of everything that is good or bad about us. Our desires become God’s desires, but without boundaries. Our actions become God’s actions, but without consequence. We create a superhuman being endowed with human traits, but without human limitations.”

Asian found that the only way he could truly experience the divine was to dehumanize God in his spiritual consciousness.

Q: How do you view God?