Personal god

deity who can be related to as a person

A personal god is a deity who can be related to as a person instead of as an impersonal force.

Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and suppose they mean something shared by all? — Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. ... Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Quotes

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  • I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar.
  • It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
  • I have suggested that it is the eternal, timeless, transcendent God that appears to fill the gaping hole left when our deepest desires encounter the world. This may be true enough, but it is very incomplete. The philosophical vocations of the Hellenistic and Roman eras also sought out eternity and transcendence. Yet their stories have quite a different flavor. One might seek tranquility in the face of inevitable death, as the Epicureans did; or unity with a cosmic source of wisdom, as the Stoics did; or a prophetic rejection of human pretense, as Diogenes the Cynic did. The Christian God is transcendent, but also lives intimately with us. Intimacy with a transcendent and timeless God is a difficult thing to understand or to articulate. Yet we must try, since the religious we have described are evidently acting on a passionate, personal love, as befits a personal God.
  • Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and suppose they mean something shared by all? — Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. ... Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him?
    • Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), as translated by Michael Hulse (2009), p. 16

See also

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