, 4 min read
Men Creating Their Gods
Brittney Lowe Hartley discusses why she is an atheist.
TLDR: Men created God for their specific purposes. God didn't created men.
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@nononsensespirituality
Why I'm an Atheist Over an Agnostic
One of the things that was most damaging to my testimony when I was in theology school was actually studying what kinds of societies create what kinds of gods.
And it got to the point where you could give me a society and tell me how it functions, and I will tell you what kind of God they had—and I would be right.
1. Society Type and the Gods They Create
- Trade-Dependent Societies: If your society was dependent on trade, you would have polytheistic, tolerant gods. We're talking Hindu gods, Roman gods. They don't require a lot of people, and also, by being tolerant of diverse beliefs, it allows for flowing trade.
- Strict Hierarchies: If the society is a hierarchy with a strict, authoritarian leader at the top, then the gods will also be that too; that god will be omnipotent and controlling. Think Islam.
- Egalitarian Hunter-Gatherers: If you have a small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, then you have animism, and your god will not really be watching over your morality.
In fact, we only get gods who need to watch over people's morality when the society gets too big that it can't self-manage. So, for example, if you're a thief in a small tribe, then everybody knows that you're a thief, and you pay a social cost for that. But if you're in a big society, you actually don't know who everybody is. And so, you need God to fulfill that role of, “I'm watching you.”
2. Environment and Agriculture
If you live in an environment where there is unpredictable weather and natural disasters, you're going to have some chaotic, moody gods. Think Mesopotamian gods or Aztec gods. You're also going to have a lot of rituals in these religions because you need these rituals to feel safe in a very unpredictable world.
In a society where you have large-scale agriculture that actually is stable, you can get benevolent gods because you need long-term cooperation, you need empathy, and things like that in order to have long-term stability.
But if you are nomadic, you get punitive gods. Because if you are on the run, and you're just kind of going from land to land with your animals, and someone comes and steals your animals—that is devastating. And so, you need a God that will punish that for generations.
We can actually watch this happen in the Bible when we watch the Old Testament God turn into the New Testament God, because there are societal differences that allowed that to happen. We can even look at weather and how dependent you are on agriculture. If you're very dependent on agriculture, then you need gods that are storm gods because they control the weather.
3. The Enlightenment and the Deist God
If you have a society that values reason or the values of the Enlightenment, you're going to get a Deist God. So, this would be a creator God, but not one that has emotions, not one that's moved by personal prayer—not a personal God. This is the God that the Founding Fathers believed in because they valued rationality. So, that's the kind of god that you get: just a god that's impersonal, who created the universe but doesn't really care about us beyond that.
That was like a 10-hour lecture that I tried to whittle down to three minutes! But I even see this individually.
If you talk to people about their beliefs in God as much as I do, you see that they created the exact god that they need:
- People who psychologically need more order and structure to function have a more black-and-white, defined god.
- People who are naturally empathetic or have compassion as a core value will have a god of love.
- If you needed a revolution, you created a revolutionary kind of god.
The god of Black churches in America is different than the god of white churches in America because Black churches definitely needed a Jesus who would come and make the first last, and the last first. They needed that kind of revolution, so they really leaned on that kind of restorationist theology.
People who cannot function in this world psychologically, knowing that good guys sometimes lose and bad guys sometimes win, need a god of ultimate justice.
4. Conclusion
So, I'm an atheist not because I've looked out into the universe and I know for sure that there is no God. I also don't know how to explain life on Earth; it's still, you know, fundamentally mysterious to me.
I'm an atheist because we create God.
And I can prove how we do that as a society, and I can also see how we do that individually. If you tell me the God that you believe in, I can learn a lot about you, what you need, what your fears are, and what your subconscious desires are. And that kind of tells me that we are the ones creating God, rather than God creating us.