Why Do People Create Gods?

Imagine yourself back when you were a small child and looked up at the night sky. It's dark, mysterious, sometimes scary-looking and sometimes things move up there. When you're young, you imagine what those things moving around are. The comets, the twinkling stars. It all seems alive somehow. Like there are people up there doing magical, wondrous things. If no one tells you what they are, or if you don't discover the truth on your own, then you start to create stories to make sense of it all. Beings from another place begin to come alive when you tell your stories. If you tell those stories to other people, some of them might believe them.

Over the course of time these stories, like posts on a Facebook page, start to take on a life of their own. The stories get told to other people and morph into ideologies and religions. People of religion eventually teach these stories to their children, who don't know any better, and they grow up believing what they have been taught. But why do these stories involve gods?

When you are first born, the world is raw, scary, and big. Your first point of reference of anyone doing anything is usually your parents, the doctors, and nurses. Big people. Very big people. And they take care of you. Now time travel back to when humans started communicating to each other, at a time when there was no knowledge of science and astronomy, and you can see how these stories can get morphed easily into a mythology. People through out history have invented big people up in the sky as an explanation for what they were seeing. Labeling helps to give human beings a sense of some kind of control. If people can label it, then they know what they can do with it (ie - worship, etc.)

Now think about someone denouncing your religion. It makes you angry, right? How dare they say something negative about what you believe. It feels like a personal attack because they are telling you that what you have believed your whole life is wrong. They are saying that what your wonderful parents taught you was wrong. It feels like they are calling your parents, who are good people, liars. This is a common occurrence across many religions (and in the non-religious community as well.) It's a scary thought to have your beliefs crumble when you've lived so many years believing in something. As you get older, you grab onto your beliefs more and more in a scary world because at the end of the day, that's all you have left that feels solid. Your house could be sold from under you, your best friend or relative could die, you could lose all your money without meaning to... but you still have your beliefs. It comforts us in a chaotic existence filled with uncertainty. Life could go to hell, but at least you know you can go to heaven.

But is it really true?