Why God?

So…I think that God is very much like suicide. Both are lies that we make up to make ourselves feel better. What really happens is that things in our lives give us more anxiety than we can handle. The anxiety can be from all sorts of things…people being mean, a bad situation at home including abuse of all kinds, financial or job stress, or even just being born with bad brain chemistry.

When we have too much anxiety, we go into fight/flight mode. Fight typically can’t last very long and may manifest as having a sharp temper, but there usually isn’t much to fight or we get exhausted fighting it.

In flight mode we start by running away, which can manifest as nervous energy of some sort. But since humans aren’t very good at running, a lot of our flight instinct is to “go to ground” by going sort of catatonic, like a hibernating animal. This is also our instinct for surviving famine or plague which was probably the most stressful thing to primitive man. And when we’re provoked in that state, it makes us worse, like poking a hibernating bear.

But we’re also smart animals and our great gift and great curse is that we understand the concept of “the future,” and can think of abstractions to get out of trouble or traps in a way that a dog or cat can’t.

The problem is that the same abstraction that allows us to see “escape” by reasoning that we can climb over a fence when we can’t see the other side, which many animals can’t do…is that we can conceptualize things like “afterlife.”

So most of us were told when we were very young that dead people go to a “better place” and culture bombards us with that message. So we believe it instinctively even if we logically know it isn’t true…and we want that…thus suicide seems to be a viable escape.

In the same way, men made God up because our minds can’t deal with uncertainty and unfinished business, and humans cannot deal with a situation they have no control over. It’s been proven that when people can’t actually control a situation, they will fantasize they control it. For example people in a dice game will bet more on dice that haven’t been rolled yet than dice that have been rolled but that they can’t see, as if they could somehow influence the roll through supernatural means. This is true even of people who don’t believe in anything supernatural.

So…”God” is something we made up so we can believe we have some control and also get some relief by not worrying about things. A necessary mental trick, a system hack that we need to make our aberrant non-animal trick of understanding “future” workable. Most scientists think the way our brain evolved is more or less an evolutionary accident.

So…what’s happening is that there are real circumstances in your life that are bad. And…you are trying to get relief from the anxiety by “putting them in God’s hands.” The problem is that trick only works if things get better.

But you aren’t to blame and can take charge of at least some of your circumstances. Accept what you can’t change and work to do the best with what you can. Let that be your outlet. I don’t know if that helps, but it is how your mind works…