Who is God? One religion answers this question better than the others.

We project upon God our own biases and bigotries," says religious scholar and author Reza Aslan. God is, by definition, unhuman and is therefore impossible to conceive of—but we humans have a psychological itch that must be scratched: we're compelled to know what our god is really like so we fill in the blanks with what we know best: ourselves. One religion satisfies this urge to know better than the rest: in the birth of Jesus, God literally becomes a human being. "That, I think more than anything else, explains why Christianity is the most successful religion in the world," says Aslan. Read more at BigThink.com: https://ift.tt/2HfbF9i Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Reza Aslan: There’s a cognitive psychologist by the name of Justin Barrett who did a series of really fascinating studies about the way in which people think about God. He asked a group of devoutly religious people—Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus—he basically gave them a form to fill out about the ways in which they think about the divine. And for the most part what he found was that they answered in theologically correct ways when talking about God as being, say, omniscient or omnipresent. But then he began to engage the same subjects in conversation. He asked them to start describing in regular language how they think about God. And what he discovered is that almost every single person, when forced to start talking about God, violated those core theological principles of God being, for instance, omnipresent and omniscient. In fact, what he discovered is that the more they talked about God, the more it sounded like they were describing some person that they met on the street. And this goes to a fundamental aspect about the way that we think about the divine, whether we are ourselves believers or not. And that is that, unconsciously, we can’t help but to imagine God as essentially a divine version of ourselves. When we conceive of God we unconsciously, innately, impose upon God our own personality, our own virtues, our own vices, our own strengths, our own weaknesses. We project upon God our own biases and bigotries. We implant in God human characteristics, human personality, human desires all along with superhuman powers. And so, as a result, what we really do—again, whether we’re aware of it or not—is we divinize ourselves. If you believe in God then what you believe in is something that is, by definition, utterly unhuman. And so the question becomes: how do you talk about that thing, how do you think about that thing, how do you form a relationship with something that is utterly unhuman? Well, the way you do so is by humanizing that thing. In fact, the entire history of human spirituality can be viewed as one long, intimately linked and remarkably cohesive narrative in which human beings increasingly humanize the divine. Until, of course, in the person of Jesus, God literally becomes a human being. .