Why do humans project their personalities, prejudices, and desires onto God?

Cognitive psychologist, Justin Barrett has conducted a series of very interesting studies exploring people's perceptions of gods. He recruited a group of devout religious believers, including Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus, and asked them to fill out a questionnaire describing their beliefs about the gods. He found that the vast majority of the answers were very "theologically correct" - that is, they were standard theological answers, such as God being omniscient and omnipresent.

He then began talking to the respondents, asking them to express their views of God in layman's terms. He found that almost all of them violated those core theological principles in the course of their conversations. In fact, the more they talked, the more they sounded like they were describing some passer-by on the street. This means that people subconsciously imagine God as a deified version of themselves. We unconsciously impute our own character, virtues, vices, strengths, and weaknesses to God. We project our own prejudices and bigotries onto God. We imbue God with superhuman strengths as well as human traits, characteristics, and desires. So, whether you realize it or not, we are actually deifying ourselves.

By definition, if you believe in God, then what you believe in should be downright non-human. But the question is: how do you talk about this outright non-human? What should you make of this? How do you build a relationship with this “thing”? The answer is: to humanize this “thing”. In fact, throughout the long spiritual history of mankind, mankind has been "humanizing" God.

It wasn't until the appearance of Jesus that God became incarnate and became fully human. This, I believe, is the most important reason why Christianity has developed into the most successful religion in the world - in a way, it captures the needs of the human subconscious. The human brain automatically envisions God from a human perspective. We are born with this impulse and it is deeply rooted in the evolutionary process of humanity. Christianity tells people that God is not only like a man, but is a man. This is a fascinating idea. Originally, imagining God was a very difficult thing to do. But Christianity says that it is not difficult; you just have to imagine the most perfect man. Perfect goodness, perfect mercy, perfect innocence, that's God - that's easy to imagine.