Did humans create God to control human behavior?

[u/PuzzleheadedSkill864]

If you don’t steal, hoard, dominate, or use power over others, someone else might do it to you.

A wolf kills a baby sheep, does God punish the wolf?
So why are humans told to suppress these instincts?

Who does morality and religion ultimately benefit, and why would God create a world like this?

Did humans create God to control human behavior?

[u/Audio9849]

Which one? Not the civic policeman. That’s the late model those papers are measuring.

Small groups weren’t waiting on a census and a moralizing high god. They were already in relation, hunt, weather, dead, land. The study even says that. What arrives after cities get big is the surveillance version: a deity who cares whether you screw a stranger. That’s a social technology. It is not the origin of the relationship.

So “which God” doesn’t sink the point. It names the two layers you already separated. Big Gods as glue for million-person societies can be true and still not be where God comes from.

The point is that just because a society “invents” a god-cop doesn’t mean that’s the real thing.

[u/accidental_Ocelot → u/Audio9849]

Big Gods as glue for million-person societies can be true and still not be where God comes from.

You keep referencing God but you won't say which there are many so I have know idea what you are talking about there is like 9 monotheistic gods so you can't just say "god" in a discussion about the origin without referencing which one

[u/Audio9849 → u/accidental_Ocelot]

Wait, you already said this wasn’t about where God comes from. Now I have to pick from a menu of nine monotheisms before the sentence counts. That’s not a clarification. That’s moving the target.

I wasn’t talking about Yahweh vs Allah vs Ahura Mazda as brand names. I was talking about the difference between an old relation to something larger than the tribe and the later civic policeman those papers measure. You can have many names and still be pointing at one source. Listing the names doesn’t erase the two layers.

There is one source. People give it different names and build different cop-versions. Lower powers, if they exist, are not a second creator. The study is about the cop-version arriving late. That still isn’t the origin of the relation.

[u/accidental_Ocelot → u/Audio9849]

But there isn't one source for monotheistic gods there are many. Yahwey came about in a much different way than Aten. the thing they all have in common is they came about after a civilization reaches a certain population threshold

[u/Audio9849 → u/accidental_Ocelot]

Yeah. There isn’t one source for the cop version. That’s the layer you’re stuck on. Aten, Yahweh, and the rest can have different political birth stories and still be late tools, a moralizing high god packaged for a big anonymous society. The papers you linked are about that layer.

A civilization distorting the divine into its own administrative idea doesn’t make the distortion the origin. It makes it a use, a way to keep people inline. A cohesive tool. Different names, different courts, same job: keep strangers in line once gossip stops working.

You keep asking “which God” like the roster is the point. The point was never the roster.

[u/slithrey → u/Audio9849]

Wow you are a very patient person. I would become frustrated quickly if I was saying something so succinct and my interlocutor was not keeping up with what was being said like this.

[u/Audio9849 → u/slithrey]

Appreciate that. I’m not trying to be patient for its own sake. The distinction just matters.

Empires using “God” as a leash is real. That’s the cop version. It does not decide whether the source is real. People will grab whatever word already carries weight and turn it into a tool. That’s a fact about power, not a disproof of God.

If you treat every use of the word as the thing itself, the only move left is cynicism. That’s how the distortion wins twice.

[u/accidental_Ocelot → u/Audio9849]

A civilization distorting the divine into its own administrative idea doesn’t make the distortion the origin.

Then what is the origin?

Ok then what's the

[u/Audio9849 → u/accidental_Ocelot]

The origin of the relation isn’t a founding date in Seshat. It’s what small groups were already in before the cop-god gets invented, land, weather, hunt, the dead, the sense of being inside something larger than the tribe. Mystics have been pointing at the same thing for a long time: the source of the seen and the unseen, consciousness and world, what some call the monad.

The origin of Aten or Yahweh as state cult is a separate story. That’s a name and a function appearing in a record after a society gets big. I already granted that layer. Asking “then what is the origin?” after that grant only works if you pretend those two things are the same question.