[0:00]
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 
[0:32]
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 
[1:06]
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 
[1:40]
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 
[2:10]
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 
[2:44]
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 
[3:14]
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 
[3:45]
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 
[4:16]
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