8 September 1956
Definition (acceptable to me) of God: “The incomprehensible, ever-present ruling intelligence and power behind creation.”
“It is of no great importance that we should call this power “God” . . . We establish an inner contact with this power as we give attention to it. Because we do not all make the same contacts, men have dared to judge and punish and kill one another in the name of their conceptions of God, which each has arrogantly assumed to be the only correct one
“Probably the designation of God as Father is largely responsible for the personal God of the child mind. This mind has clothed Him with parent attributes on a large scale and has thus kept Him anthropomorphic (manlike or resembling man). How many Gods have come down to us as legacies of the past! How many ideas of Him, colored by the minds in which they took form and shape! A just God, whose dominant principle was an eye for an eye, and who meted out punishment accordingly. A changeable God, now giving, now withholding. A jealous God, demanding sacrifice and service. A loving God, too kind to be altogether just! And angry God, destroying and laying waste. A God to be feared and obeyed, loved, flattered and praised, implored and cajoled.
“The wisest thing we can do is to abolish, once and forever, all these man-made conceptions of deity, and to give some attention to the creation of our own; to ask ourselves, “What does God mean to me?” When I turn the brilliant calculus of Truth on these products of other men’s imagination, what do I find that appeals to me? My idea of God may not be yours, not yours mine. No one has a right to impose his interpretations upon another in the form of belief or creed or dogma . . .
