Projecting God

In the past, our concept of God was often too much a projection of our own anger and incapacity to forgive each other. Hence, we tended to paint God as a punishing God, a God with a great recording book within which every one of our sins was written and who subsequently demanded some kind of payment for every one of those sins. He was a God who had drawn up some very strict criteria (“the narrow way”) for salvation. Hellfire awaited those who could not morally Vault over that rather lofty high-jump bar. We lived in fear of that God.—The Holy Longing, 238