God Has No Shoulders

“People believe in god because there are things that frighten them beyond their control and the idea that someone is there to look after them gives them hope and stability”.

Growing up as an atheist, I’ve heard this argument from several people who wanted me to dial down my atheism. And it did work on me. In the past many years I’ve not been actively atheism-ing. Let people use whatever lucky charms they believe in, I thought.

But there’s a problem with this.

God doesn’t exist

God doesn’t exist. And I don’t mean in the atheistic sense that there is no proof of god’s existence. I mean in the philosophical sense that god as a concept doesn’t really exist in a well-defined form. The concept of god is ambiguous, vague, and for all practical purposes non-existent.

What does exist is the concept of religion.

Places of worship, rituals, prayers, holy books, priests. These exist.

And these define the rules of your engagement with the so-called god.

If they say you’ve to get up at 3 am and stand on your head to talk to god, you do that.

If they say your donation to god in INR should be proportionate to the size of the problem, you scale your donation.

You pronounce your god’s name as how they dictate it.

God doesn’t exist independent of religion. God is religion.

Independent gods are also non-existent

Then there are people who are like, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual. My concept of god is as a higher power”.

Let’s call this the “independent god”. This god is not exactly defined by religion. But then what’s it defined by?

It’s defined by those individuals themselves. They decide the rules that this god follows, the frequency of reminders this god needs, what powers this god has, and so on. They define this god in whatever way they want.

Whether someone else defines the god for you, or you define the god for yourself, it is all imagination. And there’s a problem with imagination.

The limits of imagination

You can only imagine what you know!

Let’s say you are taking a test which you haven’t prepared for. For a question, you have to choose between answer A and answer B. You can pray to your imagined god for the strength to accept your fate, you can pray to your imagined god to forgive you for not preparing, but you can never pray to your imagined god for the answer.

Because your imaginary god is limited by your imagination and your knowledge.

You can’t imagine solutions to unsolved problems.

Why god is a bad therapist

And here’s where this becomes significant.

Imagine someone is going through a hard time in their life.

And they’re looking for answers.

And you present them with this imaginary god.

An imaginary god who doesn’t understand your specific situation, cannot know about what you’re going through, does not speak to you directly, and will not be able to answer you.

You’re essentially leaving them alone to solve it on their own.

God as a mental health tool is an incredibly alienating, confusing, and overall depressing tool that is also prone to being misused for exploitation.

If you try to lean on god’s shoulders, you’ll just fall down. Because god has no shoulders.

Do you need shoulders?

Let me address a criticism before you make it. There will be twenty people who read this and say “Oh Akshay, you’re an idiot, because I’ve used god as a crutch and it has worked for me”. To them my answer is: it’s not god, it’s you.

You have, through your life experience, figured out some ways to deal with emotions. And while you invoke god, you’re actually using your life skills. And it worked for you. Good!

But you might come across a situation which you do not have the skills for. And at that point your god crutch will fail.

And that is why it is important to have a proper, better solution like a good therapist or good friends. They have actual shoulders you can lean on.

Sometimes you don’t need more though. There are situations when you can figure things out on your own. It might be tempting to credit god in these situations.

Using god limits your growth

By giving all credit to god, you are undervaluing yourself. You fail to see your skills. More importantly, you fail to see your weaknesses.

By obfuscating the real source of your strength (you), you become ignorant of your own weaknesses.

If you label it right and identify yourself as the agent of your life, you will start seeing ways you can strengthen yourself. You will read, learn, explore, and grow. You will start using psychology, neuroscience, politics, sociology, history, and so many other fields of knowledge to deepen your soul. You will build friendships and other relationships that transform you in ways you couldn’t have predicted. You will find meaning and joy.

The broader harms of god’s shoulders

It’s not just that people can do better when they get rid of god. It’s that society can do better when it gets rid of god.

A lot of people are scared of a society without god. They say that science can ruin the world without morality. They implicitly assume that god gives them morality. And in turn they encourage religions. And the society ends up being under the control of unquestionable beliefs that form the basis of capitalism, caste, patriarchy and all the other harmful things we see today.

I see morality in science. I see morality in critical thinking.

I think the world would be much better off if we killed off religion and replaced it with making everyone think harder, question things, and be held responsible to think about morality on their own.

The delegation of morality and wisdom to god is the root of all problems.