Came across an interesting article about our projecting our beliefs to a deity. I’ve always presuming this to be true, now here’s the test study to prove it. Some excerpts:

They asked subjects a series of questions about controversial moral issues, such as the death penalty and abortion, and also asked them about beliefs on those issues of famous people and of God. Not surprisingly, subjects’ own beliefs mirrored the beliefs they attributed to God.

These two lines of evidence both suggest that people tend to project onto God their own moral beliefs. This … does imply that people can change their moral beliefs first, and then attribute those changing beliefs to God after the fact.

Stepping back, the study draws the following conclusion, which I fully agree with:

This is why questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief.

The full article is located here.