Wrong Comparison between
God and Man

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

To think God to be like man is to try to bring God to the human level. All forms of wrong notions about God are a product of 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 on the fact that he himself is a created being, should have led a person to acknowledge the existence of the Creator. But because of the above-mentioned analogy that people drew between human beings and God, they were not ready to accept Him.

But many of those who accepted God made the very same mistake, albeit in a different way. They observed that when people do something, it is often with the direct or indirect help of many other people. On this basis, they began attributing partners and helpers to God. Among human beings, the recommendation of ‘big’ people with access to those in power and authority helps in getting things done. Accordingly, it was assumed that God, too, had some special people who were very close to Him, who had great influence in His court and whose recommendation God accepted.

Human beings are subordinated 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 special emotional link with members of a special group or community, and that His relations with them were altogether different from His relations with the rest of humankind.

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

To consider oneself to be like God is to imagine that one is the master of one’s destiny, and that one is completely free to do whatever he wants or to abstain from whatever he wants to. It is to imagine that one is free to devise the principles of one’s life as one wishes and to determine what is permissible and what is forbidden through one’s own reasoning.

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