[Quranic Reflection]: Anthropomorphism and God in Islam

[Belacqua]

God is an entity that we can't imagine with our minds

I wonder if the tendency to anthropomorphize has something to do with the fact that the big religions are supposed to be for everybody, including both the educated and the illiterate. 

So for example Americans think of Taoism as being philosophical and abstract, because the Tao Te Ching has been fairly well known in English. It doesn't talk about a Big Father or a scary Hell. But I know that (pre-Mao) if you went to a Taoist temple in China there would likely be paintings of Hell to scare the simple people into behaving themselves. There was a difficult version for people who were better educated, and another version for the regular folk.

It's just easier to imagine a Heavenly Father than an apophatic divine. So the elites were comfortable with a simplified version for the common folk, which took the symbols more at face value. No doubt it offends our modern democratic feelings today, but I think a two-tier approach was common in Taoism, Buddhism, and Christianity. 

But I don't know about Islam.