Explores the nature and purposes of our personal and highly subjective psychological "images" and "representations" of God -- those complex mental creations constructed out of the god-materials we have appropriated from each layer of our developmental history and that depict many of our basic intrapsychic, interpersonal, and existential hopes, dreams, wishes, fears, conflicts, and longings.

• Introduction and Basic Varieties of Religious Experience
  (theism, pantheism and mysticism, atheism, and agnosticism).
• Pathological Religious Experience
  (the castigated self; hellfire and brimstone; the gods of war).
• Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
  
• Anchor of Hope
  
• References
  

Randy Hoedeman is the Director of the Counselling and Psychotherapy program at the Pittsburgh Pastoral Institute. He describes his "credentials" for the topic this way:

"This Psychology of Religion material has been some time in the making. It's been incubating, or gestating, at least since 1973 when, fresh out of college, I went trotting off to seminary idealistially and enthusiastically in search of God and a theological formula for changing the world. Thus far, I have failed miserably at the latter, but did manage to hang around the seminaries long enough to get a Ph.D. in the Psychology of Religion, of all things. Time will tell what you think that has been worth!"