Mormons claim that God the Father has a “body of flesh and bones.” Nowhere is this statement made in the Bible, so they support this idea through the statement that God created man in His own image, which requires that God look like a man. However, there are many problems with this interpretation. First, the Bible says that God created both males and females in His image. Unless God were a herm...

Feminine language for God has been largely absent within Christianity. However, a focus on feminine aspects of the divine can help Christians reclaim characteristics of God that get lost in a religion where language of God the Father is pervasive. This paper addresses the use of Mother as a metaphor for God and its implications for a therapeutic context. The current conversation around parental...

Do forgiving God primes strengthen support for state-sanctioned punishment? Laurin et al (2012) found that beliefs in powerful, intervening Gods (both in general and when made salient) reduce people’s endorsement of state-sanctioned punishment. In light of this, we investigated whether the manner in which God intervenes (via forgiveness or punishment) influences people’s endorsement of state-sa...

Reincarnation is a major facet of the eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Many sects have variant views of reincarnation. Here is a general summary of the basic principles. Most hold to a pantheistic view of God. Pantheism comes from the Greek pan meaning “all” and concept of theism meaning “God.” In Pantheism, God is an impersonal force made up of all things; the universe is God and Go...

Reincarnation is a major facet of the eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Many sects have variant views of reincarnation. Here is a general summary of the basic principles. Most hold to a pantheistic view of God. Pantheism comes from the Greek pan meaning “all” and concept of theism meaning “God.” In Pantheism, God is an impersonal force made up of all things; the universe is God and Go...

Philosophers have often misunderstood Kierkegaard’s views on the nature and purposes of God due to a fascination with his earlier, pseudonymous works. We examine many of Kierkegaard’s later works with the aim of setting forth an accurate view on this matter. The portrait of God that emerges is a personal and fiercely loving God with whom humans can and should enter into relationship. Far from a...

The Bible tells that after Methuselah was born, Enoch “walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters.” Then when he became 365 years old, Enoch had a unique homegoing to heaven. The Bible says, “Enoch walked with God, then he was no more, because God took him away” (Gen. 5:22). Someone said that God and Enoch were walking and talking together, and God says, “You know, Enoch, it’s c...

Scrupulosity is a moral/religious subtype of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) that remains understudied within the extant literature. Drawing from separate lines of research suggesting that attachment insecurities underlie OCD and that God functions psychologically much like other attachment figures, we examined a purported association between attachment to God and scrupulosity. A large samp...

Some philosophers claim that it is not possible for God, if God exists, to figure in the phenomenological content of experience. W.T. Stace was one such philosopher committed to this claim, but he offered nothing in the way of an argument for it. William Forgie, however, has argued that on the assumption of two putatively plausible theses about the phenomenology of experience, phenomenologicall...