What shall we call God? An exploration of metaphors coded from descriptions of God from a large U.S. undergraduate sample.
Journal
PloS one
ISSN: 1932-6203
Titre abrégé: PLoS One
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 101285081
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
2021
2021
Historique:
received:
21
12
2020
accepted:
01
07
2021
entrez:
12
7
2021
pubmed:
13
7
2021
medline:
23
11
2021
Statut:
epublish
Résumé
People use numerous metaphors to describe God. God is seen as a bearded man, light, and love. Based on metaphor theories, the metaphors people use to refer to God reflect how people think about God and could, in turn, reflect their worldview. However, little work has explored the common metaphors for God. This was the purpose of the current investigation. Four trained raters coded open-ended responses from predominantly Christian U.S. undergraduates (N = 2,923) describing God for the presence or absence of numerous metaphoric categories. We then assessed the frequency of each of the metaphor categories. We identified 16 metaphor categories that were present in more than 1% of the responses. The top categories were "GOD IS POWER," "GOD IS HUMAN," and "GOD IS MALE." These findings were similar across religious affiliations. We attempted to support our coding analysis using top-down and bottom-up automated language analysis. Results from these analyses provided added confidence to our conclusions. We discuss the implications of our findings and the potential for future studies investigating important psychological and behavioral outcomes of using different metaphors for God.
Identifiants
pubmed: 34252167
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254626
pii: PONE-D-20-40121
pmc: PMC8274864
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
e0254626Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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