“Anything that can be said or thought of God is, as it were, a screen between us and God. If we take it literally, absolutely, we are in a way short-circuiting our own experience of an ultimately ineffable mystery, something that cannot be talked about.

Half of the people in the world think the reference of a metaphor is a fact. The other half of the world knows that it’s a lie. So we have people who believe in God as a fact and people who believe that he’s not a fact: theists and atheists.

The real position is to realize that the word God is metaphorical of a mystery, and the mystery is absolutely beyond all human comprehension. The first thing to know when you’re dealing with these symbolic forms is that the ultimate reference is beyond all categories of human thought.” –

When spiritual rights are demanded on the basis of religious metaphors as facts and geography instead of as symbols of the heart and spirit, a bitterly divided world arises with the inevitability of great tragedy. Joseph Campbell.