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 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 for diverse beliefs
it allows for flowing trade
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 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 kind of 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 actually know who everybody is
and so you need god to kinda fulfill that role of I'm watching you
if you live in an environment where there is unpredictable weather
and natural disasters you're gonna have some chaotic
Moody gods think Mesopotamian gods
Aztec gods you're also gonna 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
and 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 society differences that allowed that to happen
we can even look at whether
how dependent are you on agriculture
if you're very dependent on agriculture
then you need gods that are storm gods because they control the weather
if you have a society that values reason or the values of like the Enlightenment
you're gonna get a deist god
so this would be a creator god
but not one that has emotions
not the one that's moved by personal prayer
not a personal god
this is what founder that 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 uh
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 psychologically function
have a more black and white uh
defined god
people who are naturally empathetic or have um
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
who would 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
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 kind of life
on earth it's still
you know fundamentally mysterious to me
I'm an atheist because we create god
and I can prove that 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 can learn a lot of about you
and what you need and 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