I was asked the following question by a facebook friend:
“I listen to my friends talk about a very human-sounding relationship with Invisible Jesus, and I certainly can’t disprove it. But I have to wonder, do we create our gods in OUR own image to heal the pain of loneliness, to assuage the fear of abandonment. Is a lot of the Christian religion a socially acceptable way to deal with a borderline personality disorder?”
Here is my answer, but feel free to give yours:
As an introvert, I don’t find images to be helpful in contemplating the unity and mystery of things, but I know many extroverts who find it helpful to project their intuitions outside themselves into human shapes and stories so they can gain a better sense of what their deepest intuitions are saying. The important thing, if one uses religious images, is to not to believe in them, but through them. The end game of religion is reality not itself
As long as you believe in the myth of your self you will need another myth to counter balance it. To lose belief in God and retain belief in our egos is like making our home on one end of a teeter-totter. To say “God is love” is a just poetic version of the core insight of relativity. It is saying that the universe is all relationship and no abiding separate substances. A good symbol will lead us to that sense of interconnectivity and then crumble into ashes.