Dear Freud,
We don’t tell children about Santa because we’re cruel.
We tell them because the story works.
It encourages good behavior.
It comforts.
It gives structure to chaos.
It wraps rules in magic.
And when children eventually outgrow the story, most of us don’t feel betrayed. We smile. We understand why it existed. We recognize that it served a purpose at the time.
Religion, Freud suggested, might work the same way.
Not as a lie told with malice, but as an illusion born of need. A story that answers questions we weren’t yet equipped to face. A psychological shelter built to protect us from a universe that feels overwhelming, indifferent, and unpredictable.
Freud didn’t say religion was stupid.
He said it was useful.
Humans crave guardians. When we’re small, parents fill that role. When we grow up and realize our parents are fragile, limited, and mortal, the need doesn’t disappear. It just looks for a bigger home.
Enter God.
A cosmic parent.
An invisible authority.
A watcher who sees everything.
A judge who ensures fairness when the world doesn’t.
And as civilizations formed, that idea became even more convenient.
Rules are easier to follow when they come from the heavens.
Laws are harder to question when they’re divinely endorsed.
Social order stabilizes when disobedience risks eternal consequences.
You don’t just break our rules.
You break God’s.
History makes this pattern hard to ignore. The questions religion tends to answer often align neatly with the needs of those in power. Who may marry. Who may rule. Who may speak. Who must obey. Moral codes arrive with cosmic backing just in time to reinforce the existing structure.
Nietzsche noticed this too. Morality, sanctified. Authority, eternalized. Human values projected upward and declared universal.
And long before gods were fathers, many were mothers.
Early deities were often goddesses. Fertility, earth, creation, nourishment. The shift toward male, authoritarian gods mirrors shifts in social power more than metaphysical discovery. Which suggests something quietly radical:
Gods change as societies change.
Which raises the Santa-sized question we’ve been circling.
What if God isn’t discovered…
but invented?
Not out of deception, but out of fear.
Out of longing.
Out of the need for meaning, order, comfort, and reassurance.
A story to make sense of lightning.
A story to soothe grief.
A story to keep the children in line.
A story to keep adults from feeling alone in the dark.
That doesn’t make belief pathetic.
It makes it human.
And here’s Freud’s sharpest insight:
Shared belief can protect us from individual despair. Accepting a “universal neurosis” spares us the burden of constructing our own private one.
In other words, it’s easier to inherit a story than to face the silence alone.
So we ask, gently, without ridicule:
If God didn’t exist, would we have invented something very much like God anyway?
And if the answer is yes…
what does that tell us about the universe?
Or about ourselves?
Still wondering what we outgrow,
~ The Radical Left