Lauren Ashcraft  🌹Compte certifié

1. At our best, we project goodness, power, kindness and love onto God. At our worst, we create a God who is punitive, angry, judgmental and harsh. We do this because we are those things, and we think they make us safe.

2. Projection itself is not the problem. The problem occurs when we don’t examine those projections with a critical eye, with a hermeneutic of suspicion. The issue is when we write laws that codify the shadow parts of the god we create to diminish and abuse others.

3. When we neglect to confront this created god, we get the Crusades and the Doctrine of Discovery; the murder of indigenous people and Jews; apartheid and enslaved Africans; sexism, xenophobia and homophobia—all in the name of the god that is really the worst of ourselves.