Many years ago when I started to study divinity as a teenager at school there was a conceit amongst religious people that went something like; ‘If god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.’
Leaving aside the strange irony obvious to atheists, hidden within the statement, it is one of those very telling phrases that speaks volumes about how human beings think. Those of you who have read me for a while will know I accept as undeniable that religions tell us more about human beings than they ever tell us about a (supposed) godhead. But I find myself wondering why people think he would be necessary?
We might look at the common critiques of religions and talk about ways in which human beings are controlled for an answer, or we may, as I prefer, look at how fearful we actually are of life. A fear inbred in us from the times when we were vulnerable to predatory animals and much more vulnerable to diseases than we even are now. Such vulnerabilities may not actually be gone.
When we see the hurricanes and the earthquakes we see people need a place to go, and the emotional place has always been to someone who can care for us. This is what makes a godhead a necessity in our imaginations, the terror of all this being an accident and our self-awareness being no more than a product of our brains signifying nothing.
Chaos makes gods.