Wrong Comparison
Between God and Man

Comparing God to man is tantamount to arrogating to oneself a right that is God’s alone. Moreover, every such supposition is entirely false because a human being, in reality, is a helpless creature, and he can in no sense acquire the status of the Creator.

A human being has always erred in trying to understand God and himself. He has thought of God to be like himself, and he to be like God. Man of every age has made this mistake. The whole of human history is the story of this mistake and its consequences.

To think of God as a man is to try to bring God to the human level. However, unfortunately, all forms of wrong notions about God result from this mistake, involving assumptions about God based on wrong analogies between man and Him.

We come into this world through biological parents. On this basis, it was assumed that if there is a God, He, too, must have a parent or parents, that there must have been someone before God who brought God into being. Because the eternal God is not physically visible to an individual, he began denying His existence. Observing himself, reflecting that he is a created being, should have led a person to acknowledge the Creator’s existence. However, because of the analogy mentioned above that people drew between human beings and God, they were not ready to accept Him.

However, many who accepted God made the same mistake, albeit differently. In the human world, when they observed that things occur directly or indirectly with the help of other people, they began attributing partners and helpers to God as well. Among human beings, the recommendation of ‘big’ people with access to power and authority helps get things done. Accordingly, it was assumed that God had some special people who were very close to Him, had significant influence in His court and whose recommendations God would accept.

Human beings are subordinate to their emotions. Often, they ignore the demands of Truth and decide things under the sway of their emotions. Drawing an analogy from this, people invented the belief that God had a particular emotional link with members of a special group or community and that His relations with them differed from His relations with the rest of humankind.

All such beliefs are a negation of God’s divinity. However, unfortunately, people often cling to such baseless thoughts and imaginary beliefs in their foolishness.

To consider himself like God is to imagine that a man is the master of his destiny and that he is entirely free to do whatever he wants or abstain from whatever he wants. It is to imagine that he is free to devise the principles of his life as he wishes and determine what is permissible and forbidden through reasoning.

Every such effort is, as it were, tantamount to putting ourselves in God’s place, arrogating to ourselves a right that is God’s alone. Moreover, every such supposition is entirely false because a human being, in reality, is a helpless creature, and he can in no sense acquire the status of the Creator.