God is trapped in the mental constructions we ourselves have erected. God does not need to be liberated from an external captivity. Throughout history, we have projected our moral categories, fears, desires, guilt, and aggression onto the highest principle we could imagine. The result is an image of God that doesn’t so much reveal what God is, but discloses who we ourselves are.

Projection is a structural mechanism of consciousness. It allows us to externalise inner tensions so that they remain manageable. What is too threatening to acknowledge as part of ourselves is made visible as something outside ourselves. In personal relationships, this leads to misunderstanding, alienation, and conflict. On a collective level, projection takes on a mythical scale and shapes ideologies, religions, and images of the enemy.

When a society institutionalises projections, moral blindness emerges. This happens because the framework through which it perceives is already distorted. Within such a framework, violence appears necessary, oppression seems rational, and exclusion appears justified. Evil is always located elsewhere.

That same dynamic has become deeply embedded in our religious traditions. The image of God that arises from this has a dual character. On the one hand, it embodies our highest values, such as love, justice, and mercy. On the other hand, it legitimises our darkest impulses, such as revenge, jealousy, and destruction. The divine thus becomes an enlarged human ego with cosmic power.

A God who punishes populations, sanctions wars, and enforces loyalty through fear isn’t a transcendent reality, but a psychological construct. What we worship there is our need for political and demographic order and control. What we fear is our shadow. The theological question then shifts from what God is to what we need God to be.

Liberating God means seeing through this confusion and understanding the context from which existing religious works were composed centuries ago. It means acknowledging that the sacred cannot be reduced to human categories of good and bad, or of guilt and reward. As soon as we try to do that, we reduce the infinite to a moral instrument. That instrument is then used to regulate our fears. Or as I write in my upcoming novel, Memos from the Edge: God exists beyond religion.

The price of that reduction is existential. Those who don’t acknowledge their darkness will fight it in others. The same applies to the light. Those who don’t integrate their aggression will morally legitimise it. Thus, a world emerges in which conflicts are waged in the name of the will to dominance, while they in fact arise from an inability to engage in self-inquiry.

Opposed to this stands an understanding of the other through love. Not love as emotion or possession, but as the fundamental structure of reality. Love is that which connects without consuming. Love as abundance rather than scarcity. From that perspective, love doesn’t need to be defended because it carries itself. This insight undermines the idea of rivalry. Those who live from the concept of finite love will always compete for attention, recognition, and the right to exist. Those who live from infinite love don’t need to dehumanise others to affirm themselves.

The consciousness often called Christ consciousness doesn’t refer to dogma, at least not in the mystical works I love, but to a radical shift in perception. It’s the enduring awareness that every being is a bearer of intrinsic value. Not because it acts morally, but because it exists. That awareness does not deny the existence of evil, but refuses to reduce it to identity.

From this follows an ethic that isn’t binary, in other words, non-binary. Ha! I love wordplay. Love isn’t the same as passivity. Love can affirm, cooperate, heal, and confront. Confrontation isn’t a break with compassion, but a necessary form of it when boundaries are crossed. The criterion doesn’t lie in the action itself, but in the inner source from which it arises.

Acting from fear produces more fear. Acting from anger produces more violence. Acting from clarity opens the possibility of transformation, even when resistance is required. This demands a mature form of moral responsibility that goes beyond well-intentioned motives.

One of the most significant problems of our time is that knowledge has become disconnected from wisdom. We possess unprecedented amounts of information, but lack a coherent framework in which it gains meaning. I know, I have written about this before. Without inner integration, knowledge becomes instrumental. Technology develops faster than ethics. Power grows faster than self-reflection.

This lack of integration manifests at all levels. In families, organisations, states, and ultimately on a planetary scale. Wherever the self is conceived as a separate entity, a struggle arises over resources, status, and identity. That struggle is clothed in moral language, but remains structurally the same. A shift in self-understanding is therefore urgently needed. From the autonomous ego to the relational self. From identity as boundary to identity as connection. This calls for a fundamental revision of how we situate ourselves in the world.

Liberating God means reclaiming our projections, not by denying them, but by integrating them. It means taking responsibility for what we see in the world. Only when we acknowledge that the evil we fight can also move through us does the possibility of real change arise.

A spirituality that doesn’t make this movement will always become an ally of violence. That has become clear in recent years. That form of spirituality will defend dominance at the expense of humanity. It will use the absolute to overpower the relative.

A spirituality that does make this movement automatically loses enemies and constructs such as ‘the final judgment’. This is because dehumanisation disappears even when conflict persists. That form acknowledges the complexity of existence without constantly reducing it to the text of the ‘sacred books’ and the created form of the divine.

From this perspective, God is not an authority that demands obedience and brings a reckoning, but a depth that invites awareness. Not a moral bookkeeper but a living relationship. Not a projection screen but an open space in which we come to know ourselves. And yes, this isn’t a comfortable path to walk. It requires continual self-questioning. It means letting go of our certainties without falling into relativism and having the courage to live without an enemy.

The alternative is already familiar to us—more projection, polarisation, and ‘holy’ justifications for violence. As humanity, we face a choice that isn’t an ideological problem, but an existential question. Either we continue to use God to evade ourselves, or we liberate God by finally taking responsibility for who we are. In other words, it’s up to you.