The NGFG Theory : Why humans believe in the God

In my last post, titled “The Creator Theory : Why humans believe in the God”, I put forward one of the reasons (I believe) why humans believe in the God.

Here in this post I am putting forward a second explanation for people’s belief in the God. I have titled this explanation as the NGFG theory or in a longer version the Need, Greed, Fear and Goodness Theory.

The NGFG Theory
Need, greed, fear and goodness are four basic emotions that we find in every human being. I think that the creators of religion used these basic four emotions and weaved the concept of the God around it. Since everybody of us has these four basic emotions we are able to relate to the God through these emotions.

Need
Need can also be described as want. We are led to believe that if we pray to the God and ask him for something he will fulfill our wishes. The whole concept of ‘Mannat’ is based on this principle.

Greed
Greed is wanting more of something you already have. This is basically an extension of need. You wanted something. Now you have it. But you are not satisfied and want more. This also basically, ‘ask him and he will fulfill your wishes’

Fear
Fear is a powerful influence. In traditional religion the concept of heaven and hell are based on the principle of fear. Be good and you will get heaven. Do bad deed and you will be condemned to hell. When was the last time you heard, “Bhagavan naraaz ho jayaenge”? or “Shahidon ko jannat nasib hoti hai”

Goodness
So is all bad with the concept of the God? No. Quite a few also believe in the God through true altruistic motives where we want and wish good to others through our thoughts and deeds.

So our version of the God is defined through the amounts of these four basic emotions present in us. Find out what is your mix and you will get your version of the God.

The Creator Theory : Why humans believe in the God

As I have declared a lot of times before, I am a non-believer. But it was not always so. I turned a non-believer somewhere in between 19-22 years of my age. As for exactly when? I am not sure. But from 19th year to 22nd year of my life, there was a lot of turmoil in me. After that I slowly found my peace as I finally accepted my status as a non-believer.

I have thought long and hard about why we believe in God. There are two answers to this question. I call these answers as theories. First one is the Creator theory and the second is NGFG (Need, Greed, Fear and Goodness) theory.

Our need to know who is the creator and purveyor of this world:

We as humans are curious animals. Generally we don’t like unanswered questions. Not knowing answers to questions creates uncertainty. We are looking for certainty and stability in our lives. So when we stumble across mysteries which our existing body of scientific knowledge can’t answer, we attribute these mysteries as deeds of the Supernatural. If these deeds are good in nature, we generally attribute it to the God and if they are evil in nature we attribute them to the Devil.

So if the God is not the creator of the world then who is? The honest answer to this question is that we don’t know. We are still looking abut we haven’t found the answer. Our science has yet failed to conclusively find out who created the world or how the world was created.

But if we give enough time to the scientists (it may take a 1000 years but this is still a very short time if we compared it to the evolution of religion and spiritual theory.) they will surely find who created the world and how?

If we gave enough time and attention to these nature’s mysteries, eventually we solve them. Take for example, in Hindu religion, the act of rain is attributed to the Lord Varun and various kinds of elaborate religious rituals were used to be performed so as to make it rain. But today we know how and why rain falls. In fact we have developed means to create artificial rain.

Ok I agree that it may not be as easy to find out how the world was created, but I believe given time science will give explanation for the question.