Anthropo-what?

Humans like to anthropomorphize things; it’s almost a defining characteristic. God tells me this is because we were made in his image.

By the way, that’s one of those things that’s meant to be taken metaphorically, like that the universe was created in seven days. God doesn’t have a constant or even consistent corporeal form, so saying that we were made in his image has nothing to do with looking like God, or with being shaped like God or anything like that. Which is exactly why anthropomorphication comes from being created in his image.

In a sense, everything in the universe is a piece of God, so everything is like an aspect of God. From that we can say, without being too far off, that everything in the universe has one or more characteristics of God. So, again in a sense, when God created the universe, he did the super-sized godly equivalent of anthropomorphication.

So if we go around seeing aspects of humanity in everything, perhaps it’s just because we go around seeing aspects of God in everything and we see the most of them in ourselves, so when we see a smaller number of them in other things, we see those things as being like us.

God tells me this does a lot to explain our hubris both as individuals and as a species. I just say that explaining it doesn’t make it good.

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