For the past few thousand years people have imagined God as a bearded male figure. With one notable exception, Islam, where idolatry of images is forbidden, many religions and religious art have portrayed God or the supreme deity as a middle aged or older, often a bearded male with superhuman qualities or attributes.

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Should God always be seen as Male?
 
Is God always a man? Or should the question be “Do humans always see God as a man?” This practice of attributing human characteristics to animals, plants, natural forces, abstract ideas and symbols is called anthropomorphism, also called personification or prosopopeia. In ancient Greek, ανθρωπος, anthrōpos, meant human, and μορφη, morphē, meant shape or form.

How Animals See Divinity?
Would a dog imagine or visualize divinity as a superdog with canine attributes?
After being in close contact with humans for millennia, dogs are rather used to humans and would hardly imagine humans as divine. At least our family dog doesn’t behave as if we were divine, fortunately.
Similarly, would a cow visualize divinity as a supercow, a parrot as a superparrot and a mouse as a supermouse?
Now, you can of course argue that animals don’t think and they are incapable of imagining or visualizing. You can start quoting other “learned” people or even religious scriptures that animals are lower life forms, so they are not quite as smart as yourself and thus they do not think or visualize.
Another argument often thrown to prove the lower hierarchy of animals is that animals don’t create art. Well, how many of us humans create music like Mozart and paint like Rembrandt? One last argument for animals being devoid of higher “human” faculties is that they can’t express themselves using languages. Well, what about the endless battles, fights and bitter divorce cases among biped primates who pride themselves on their civilized language skills? 
But do we really know what kind of inner mental activity the animals have? Animals observe and interpret natural phenomena, can solve complex problems and make distinct rational choices. Animals build nests in their own style and preference. If a bird needs to build a nest from scratch, the bird first needs to visualize a nest, then plan it’s construction, start gathering twigs and branches. As the construction progresses, the bird needs to check the progress of the construction by comparing it with the model of the nest in the head like any other human house construction engineer would check by comparing with drawings or plans.

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons

Other Forms of DivinityIn recorded human history before the age of patriarchy, we have had other forms of divinity such as mother Goddesses (the Hurrian Mother Goddess “Kheba” from which Eve supposedly gets her name), fire (Agni in Hinduism), thunder (Zeus in ancient Greece) or other ideas of divinity beyond the human capacity of description (Nirguna Brahman in Hinduism).

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Animals used to be very common as forms of deities incarnate in almost all religions earlier. With the spread of Christianity and Islam, animals have become less visible in cult religion and rituals even among African cultures.
With all our technology and science, we know precious little about the real mental activity between our own ears. Observing that inner universe is, however, an endless source of fascination and inspiration. Maybe we could get glimpses of their inner states if we started respecting animals a bit more.

Is it possible that animals are not burdened with elaborate ideas and mythologies, over which they can fight endlessly by claiming their own interpretation as the only legitimate one fighting for? Maybe dogs, cows and mice don’t even need superdogs, supercows or supermice! Could it be that, in their own way, animals are closer to the divine than biped “higher” primates, humans!