GOD: A Human History
Source: Medium, by Reza Aslan
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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. In fact, the entire history of human spirituality can be viewed as one long, interconnected, ever-evolving, and remarkably cohesive effort to make sense of the divine by giving it our emotions and our personalities, by ascribing to it our traits and our desires, by providing it with our strengths and our weaknesses, even our own bodies — in short, by making God us. What I mean to say is that, more often than not, whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves: a human being but with superhuman powers.
This is not to claim that there is no such thing as God, or that what we call God is wholly a human invention. Both of these statements may very well be true. I have no interest in trying to prove the existence or nonexistence of God for the simple reason that no proof exists either way. Faith is a choice; anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert you. 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.
That is where religion comes in. Beyond the myths and rituals, the temples and cathedrals, the dos and don’ts that have, for millennia, separated humanity into different and often competing camps of belief, religion is little more than a “language” made up of symbols and metaphors that allows believers to communicate, to one another and to themselves, the ineffable experience of faith. It’s just that, throughout the history of religions, there has been one symbol that has stood out as universal and supreme — one grand metaphor for God from which practically every other symbol and metaphor in nearly all the world’s religions has been derived: us; the human being.
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Think about the way believers so often describe God as good or loving, cruel or jealous, forgiving or kind. These are, of course, human attributes. Yet this insistence on using human emotions to describe something that is — whatever else it is — utterly nonhuman only further demonstrates our existential need to project our humanity onto God, to bestow upon God not just all that is worthy in human nature — our capacity for boundless love, our empathy and eagerness to show compassion, our thirst for justice — but all that is vile in it: our aggression and greed, our bias and bigotry, our penchant for extreme acts of violence.
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Read it all at: https://medium.com/@rezaaslan/god-a-human-history-ba5e62e401e1
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"Animism (from Latin anima, "breath, spirit, life"
is the religious belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Potentially, animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork and perhaps even words—as animated and alive" -wiki
Everything has a spirit, but this is quite different from, for example polytheistic beliefs where personified gods and demigods rule all things. Instead of a personified "river god" the river itself has a spirit, but it is a river spirit, not some human like deity. Animism generally does not put humans at the center of everything with human like gods controlling the world. Instead we are just one of the many spirits in world, each expressing the unique form of their type.
