Department of Psychology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Dec 26;13(12):e0209758. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0209758. eCollection 2018.
Representations of God in art, literature, and discourse range from the highly anthropomorphic to the highly abstract. The present study explored whether people who endorse anthropomorphic God concepts hold different religious beliefs and engage in different religious practices than those who endorse abstract concepts. Adults of various religious affiliations (n = 275) completed a questionnaire that probed their beliefs about God, angels, Satan, Heaven, Hell, cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, human suffering, and human misdeeds, as well as their experiences regarding prayer, worship, and religious development. Responses to the questionnaire were analyzed by how strongly participants anthropomorphized God in a property-attribution task. Overall, the more participants anthropomorphized God, the more concretely they interpreted religious ideas, importing their understanding of human affairs into their understanding of divine affairs. These findings suggest not only that individuals vary greatly in how they interpret the same religious ideas but also that those interpretations cohere along a concrete-to-abstract dimension, anchored on the concrete side by our everyday notions of people.
艺术、文学和话语中的上帝形象从高度拟人化到高度抽象化不等。本研究探讨了那些认同拟人化上帝概念的人与那些认同抽象概念的人在宗教信仰和宗教实践方面是否存在差异。来自不同宗教背景的成年人（n=275）完成了一份调查问卷，其中探究了他们对上帝、天使、撒旦、天堂、地狱、宇宙起源、人类起源、人类苦难和人类恶行的信仰，以及他们在祈祷、敬拜和宗教发展方面的经历。通过参与者在属性归因任务中对上帝拟人化的程度来分析对问卷的回答。总的来说，参与者对上帝的拟人化程度越高，他们对宗教观念的解释就越具体，将他们对人类事务的理解导入到对神的事务的理解中。这些发现不仅表明，个体在如何解释相同的宗教观念上存在很大差异，而且这些解释沿着一个具体到抽象的维度一致，以人们的日常观念为基础。
