There is no reliable record of God ever being seen by man. His voice
has never been heard. His form and expression or whereabouts remain
a mystery to this day. We have nothing but guesses as to the kind
of worship he prefers, or why he should be praised. And yet, entire
countries have been plundered, pillaged, and laid waste for no other
reason than that they held different views from ours on the form or
nature of a God whom no man has ever seen, heard or comprehended. Such
is the extraordinary folly of man!
All religions are absolutely human in origin. There is not, and there
has never been, and in the nature of things there never can be a divine
or superhuman religion--that is to say, a religion invented by a god.
Let us imagine for the sake of argument, however, that a god wished to
reveal himself to us. What would be the probable course he would pursue?
Would he reveal himself to us as he is, or only as much of himself as we
needed to know or could comprehend? To reveal himself to us as he is in
all the fulness of his nature would be a moral impossibility, for the
reason that only a god could fully comprehend a god.
But if he revealed to men only as much of himself as they could grasp,
then their knowledge of him must necessarily be imperfect. We are
revealing ourselves to the animals, for instance, every day of our life,
but still the animals, owing to their limitations, can never know us
as we are, but only as they think we are. Likewise our knowledge of
supernatural beings must be as incomplete as is the knowledge of animals
concerning man. We see objects as the structure of our eyes permits us
to see them, or as our minds grasp them. The reflection of the sky in
a drop of dew is limited to the capacity of the dew. Owing to this
adaptation of objects to the powers of the observer before they can be
observed at all, it may be said that objects are seen not as they really
are but as they appear to the observer. Since, then, a divine revelation
cannot overcome the limitations of the finite mind, God could be no more
to us than what _we_ think he is, or in other words, what we make him to
be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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