The discussion on another thread inspired me to start this one. It is about creating or moulding our idea of God to follow our own personality. I read recently, that you can tell if you have created God in your own image if he ends up hating all the same people you do. Works for me!!
Anyway, it seems that often the kind of God that Christianity has is rather a weird person. We have on form in Christ, which is the loving, merciful, compassionate kind. And then we have the traditional OT kind, smiting enemies to the last man, woman and child, and bearing grudges over three or four generations; this is the one I call the Toddler God, but I suppose he could also be regarded as a Psychopath God or even NGod.
Anyway, when these variants raise their heads, I always say that in terms of sources, Christ himself is a primary historical source, and anything else is at best secondary, which makes clearer that the love, mercy and compassion win out. And then you find that in Exodus 34 God reveals his name to Moses as "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." Which makes it a consistent picture, with a few projections along the way by bloodthirsty Israelites, seeking to justify their own brutal behaviours by saying that if they happened to win, that must mean that God sanctioned their actions.
All of which leads to the comment that if we have Nparents, then our God will be based on them, until we learn to polish off all the tarnish and other dross, and find out what is beneath that is worth having. Or we may not be able to get past the whole N thing at all, which is a shame.
