Here’s the deal:

Humans need to acknowledge God.

The point is not whether you envision God as a literal, sentient, all-powerful, supreme being, or a metaphorical personification of our highest values, humans are designed with a god-space in our mental machinery.

But, the more literally you take the god-figure, the more literally you are obliged to live “by the book.” Genuine belief is not just a matter of self-proclamation, it is known by its demonstration. Belief claimed and not demonstrated is self-deception at best.

People whose God is metaphorical are free to live without guilt, shame, fear, and envy, if they’re willing to do the work, and aware enough to realize the Universe is much more powerful than they are. It created them. It will eventually take their life back from them. It is bigger and more complex than we can understand. It is eternal. It provides for our basic needs, but it requires that we live within the laws of what we have named physics. Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where to draw the line between metaphor and literalism. Reality is reality, no matter how we envision it, measure it, or describe it.

My failure to recognize my relative smallness in the greater scheme of things is perhaps the greatest hazard I face in this life, for my own sake as well as that of those whose lives I affect. Something besides myself needs to be named as the greatest power. I can conceive of, and name that entity any way that suits my temperament. But I need a conceptual placeholder, at minimum, to represent the reality of that relationship, however described.