Their Personal God

[dave_littler]

For quite some time now, I've been saying that not only do cultures create their gods in their own images, so too do individual believers within these cultures invent their gods in their own individual images. Not too long ago, we got some medical data which seems to support this contention.

A year or so ago, I remember reading about some

Comments

[dave_littler]

It seems to me that the researchers took this into consideration when conducting the study; they asked their subjects "what do you think the average American thinks of this topic"; this too is someone they have no first-hand knowledge of per se; they need to think about someone else, based upon stuff they've heard, stuff they've seen elsewhere, and make a subjective call about what's in "Average American"'s head, just as they're being asked to do so with respect to their god.

I do think that you're right with respect to your second point; I probably give this sort of thing a LOT more thought to this sort of thing than the average christian does, because they get all they want or need out of the religion just by kind of passively experiencing the contentment that comes from believing themselves to be "loved" and/or "saved", whereas for me the big reward comes in the intense scrutiny and logic puzzles which the convoluted dogma systems seem to present. As such, they have no great reason to think about all of this stuff... aside from the manipulative charlatans who run the whole deal. I do think there are some genuinely insane people who give it as much thought as I do and come up with the opposite conclusion that I do, though: they scrutinize and analyze the character of the biblical god, see him as a bloodthirsty monster, and rather than recoiling from it as I do, they internalize it and become monsters for god, I suppose. I can think of no more ready explanation for the zealotry of, for example, the Spanish Inquisition.