Christianity Oasis Forum

[Angelwings]

Starting today each day i will add a new part to this subject so please try to follow me about this subject. I read it and taught it was Awesome so i decided to share it with my Oasis family. You may comment me if you wish.

" PART ONE "

Who Is God?

To get to know God a little better, it's best to cast away expectations and preconceptions that are limiting. So, it makes sense to see first who God isn't:

God isn't an old guy with a white beard sitting on a throne of heavenly clouds with a horde of angel servants, passing down judgment on whim and generally being an easily offended elitist . Strangely, that seems to be the default perception of God, and this kind of flawed way of thinking is a leading cause of many troubles in the world.

Who we think God is tells much more about ourselves than God. Since we are humans and we relate to our human identities, through the process of anthropomorphization (it's a long and ugly word, I know) we give human shape to anything that we don't fully understand so we can make it more familiar. Once we think of God as human, we liken him to ourselves and we endow God with not only our positive qualities but also our negative ones.

Essentially, when we say 'God' we think of and imagine a more powerful version of ourselves. If we set this vision of God to be outside ourselves, then we have a perfect scapegoat to blame our problems on and we gain a hopeful expectation that that someone will also solve the same problems with no effort on our behalf.

It is a sad state of affairs, but if we never grow up and accept responsibility for ourselves and our lives, then our vision of God won't mature either. To get to know God better, we have to get to know ourselves first. (Part Two Towmorrow)