I’ve often heard Christian apologists — or apologists for religion more generally — describe human beings as “creatures of worship”. Each of us have a “god”, they’ll say, so don’t make gods of things that aren’t God. The implication, of course, is that human beings are naturally inclined to worship something, be it the God of their religion or some other lofty concept or “idol”. We are “idol-making factories”, I’ve heard some say. But are we? Is this human nature, for real? I’d like to unpack these claims a little more fully.

I’ll admit, I’m not drawing these ideas from any one particular source. It’s just stuff that I’ve tended to hear in conversation over the years, so forgive me for not taking detailed notes. I’ll spare you the academic citations. For now, though, I’m not looking to critique the point-of-view of any one person in particular. I simply wish to explore the logic of worship a little bit to see if that claim, or others like it, hold up under scrutiny.

Knowing the Catholic perspective best of all, my analysis will undoubtedly be coloured by the things I’ve heard in those circles. You might think of worship as songs of praise, dropping to your knees in awe of an invisible presence (or lack thereof), or maybe even following through with rituals intended to honour the deity in question, whatever those may be. That is, typically this is a part of worship, although the practising Catholic I know tend to take a narrower view and say that worship involves sacrifice, referring of course to the commemoration of the Last Supper in the Mass, or the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Partaking in this sacrifice, then, is the only true way to worship the one God, however the definition excludes all the aforementioned practices. Otherwise, you would have to say that Catholics worship saints, and that is a big no-no in Abrahamic traditions. I’ll leave these nuances aside, though. Frankly, they’re a bit boring, and if I get caught in these types of semantics then I’ll be here all night. No thanks.

Let me just begin by asking, then, why someone would think to worship something or someone in the first place. I suppose the answer to that question will vary from person-to-person. Some want to be healed, happy, or have some particular outcome granted by the God in question, oftentimes that means to be “saved”. Others want to express gratitude for all the gifts they have in their life. That’s why people pray before they eat, after all. And these are practices that are deeply rooted in our culture, even more rooted than Christianity itself. Pagans would offer sacrifices to gods to render thanks or petition for their help. This isn’t unique to monotheism, but I would argue that, in some ways, it’s actually a lot more logical.

In the case of polytheism, you could see the gods as kinds of competing actors in the world, who can affect or fail to affect change in various ways. They were more like us, far more human than divine in many ways. So petitioning or thanking the pagan gods would be rather like how you might interact with a friend. You scratch their back, they scratch yours. They do something, you say thank you. Not so for the capital-G God: he’s untouchable, literally beyond it all, setting all the wheels in motion knowing exactly what’s going to happen. If he wanted to do something, he’d do it. You wouldn’t even need to ask. He would simply know. Of course, it’s still possible to express gratitude for the gifts of life, but then that assumes a life that’s fairly privileged, no? Some people suffer a great deal. Should God be thanked for allowing that?

I’m not trying to get into some kind of problem of evil debate, but I am curious, knowing these things, how does worship make sense? On some level, I think there’s an underlying logic of appeasement at work: people don’t want to piss off the deity, so they feed its ego so it’ll leave them alone, or they simply fear for what the god will do. When you read the Old Testament, the Israelites are punished constantly for not having worshiped God in the proper way or forsaken him for other idols. God is said to be “jealous” about this. And when you talk about God in this way, it doesn’t sound like there’s really the makings of a healthy relationship: fear, jealousy, appeasement, ego, submission and dominance, etc. Admiration alone doesn’t generate the emotions that put someone in Church, Mosque, or Synagogue every Sunday.

But going back to my original point, when you think about it, can you honestly say that this is the sort of logic that applies to our idols? An apologist is quick to say something along the lines of sex, music, or political ideology is someone’s god, rather than the true God; but as someone whose had sex, loves music, and is passionate about his political convictions, I can honestly say, it’s a vastly different relationship than the kind of “worship” theists typically have in mind.

Are we creatures of worship, then? I don’t think so. Plenty of us get on fine without it, and some of us are grounded in it. That’s totally cool. However, I believe it’s un-cool to be so reductive about human nature. Open your minds a bit, and I think you’ll see that human beings aren’t creatures of worship, as religious apologists might argue, but creatures of passion. We will do things for the sheer hell of it, for the love of it, for our own fulfillment, community, or whatever. And I daresay that for most religious folk, that’s what religion is: their passion. Heck, I’d go so far as to say that theology is as much (if not moreso) anthropology than metaphysics. But it is not the spark that engenders human nature with “spirit”. That belongs to passion itself.