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28. God / C. Attitudes to God / 4. God Reflects Humanity

[God as a projection of humanity's own image]

18 ideas
We cannot conceive of God, so we have to think of Him as an immortal version of ourselves [Plato]
Men imagine gods to be of human shape, with a human lifestyle [Aristotle]
The gods are happy, so virtuous, so rational, so must have human shape [Cicero]
The perfections of God were extrapolations from mankind [Sext.Empiricus]
Thinking of God as resembling humans results from a bad translation of Genesis 1:26 [Maimonides]
We could never form a concept of God's wisdom if we couldn't abstract it from creatures [William of Ockham]
The attributes of God just show our inability to conceive his nature [Hobbes]
A talking triangle would say God is triangular [Spinoza]
The idea of an infinite, intelligent, wise and good God arises from augmenting the best qualities of our own minds [Hume]
In all naturalistic concepts of God, if you remove the human qualities there is nothing left [Kant]
God is the essence of thought, abstracted from the thinker [Hegel, by Feuerbach]
The nature of God is an expression of human nature [Feuerbach]
If God is only an object for man, then only the essence of man is revealed in God [Feuerbach]
God is for us a mere empty idea, which we fill with our own ego and essence [Feuerbach]
God is what man would like to be [Feuerbach]
God is the realisation of the possibilities of each man's self [Green,TH]
Why is God so boring, and why does God resemble humanity so little? [Cioran]
During the rise of civilizations, the main gods changed from female to male [Watson]