“Mark and Bev Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>…

Karen Armstrong – A History of God

The 4,000 year quest of Judaism, Christianity & Islam. This book explores how the Jews transformed pagan idol worship into monotheism and how Christianity and Islam both rose from this foundation. Also explored are the variations of who or what “God” is thought to be by the various religious leaders over the centuries. ……………

“Religion was a matter of cult and ritual rather than ideas; it was based on emotion, not on ideology or consciously adopted theory. This is not an unfamiliar attitude today: many of the people who attend religious services in our own society are not interested in theology, want nothing too exotic and dislike the idea of change. They find that

the established rituals provide them with a link with tradition and give them a sense of security.”

…..

“A God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this “God” a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make “him” fulfill our expectations. We can turn “God” into a Republican or

a socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views. The danger of this has led some to see a personal God as an unreligious idea, because it simply embeds us in our own prejudice and

makes our human ideas absolute.”

…….

“A personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all

advanced religion, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize.”

“The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind–often called the imagination–rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty.”

from http://www.2think.org/hii/god.shtml

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