We Must Take Responsibility for the God or Gods We Worship

It’s not just holding ourselves responsible for morally and ethically living up to the expectations of God, but holding ourselves responsible for the God we worship in itself. No one has a spiritual excuse to increase suffering in the world, including God! —Tom F. Shadid

What does it mean that we must take responsibility for our Gods? 

The quadrune mind model is a secular spiritual model of human nature. We believe that the structure and function of the human brain tell us what spirituality is, and it is to reduce suffering and increase healing for all beings and the earth.

If our God or Gods ask anything less of us than this (such as to help only certain people), then God is not calling us to live our true nature. We believe that living the spiritual life must take priority, even over following the dictums of our God or Gods, in order for us to express the full spirituality of our inherent human nature, find fulfillment in our own lives, and contribute to a more Grownup world. And this means that we must take a long, hard look at the natures of both ourselves and our Gods.

Did God create us, or do we create our Gods?

The answer depends on if we are considering this question in a relative or ultimate sense.

At the ultimate level, we believe that God is the force that brought the human brain into existence. This leaves the form God takes very open—as a secular model, we do not say (or not say) that God is a personal God in Heaven looking over us, a force behind evolution, a universal consciousness that connects us all, or simply Universal Love. But the quadrune mind model is very clear on the nature of God. It is the force driving us to become Grownups, as evidenced by the neural development of a pre-frontal cortex dedicated to integrating the brain, along with the historical development of humanity’s ever widening circles of compassion. In other words, the true nature of God is seen in the true nature of human beings. God is simply the force driving that true nature: to reduce suffering and increase healing for all living beings and the earth.

However, relatively, we end up with many Gods who behave in seemingly completely unreconcilable ways for the exact same reason that human beings can behave, feel, think, and act in so many different ways—because it depends on which of their four minds are dominant. Each mind, when unintegrated, can only relate to, support, conceive of, and follow a God or Gods that fit that mind.

In other words, all relative Gods are created in our image, but they are not all created the same.

Our religious or spiritual beliefs are exactly that—beliefs. They are a creation of one of our minds. For example, if our God wants us to follow rigid doctrines, whether we understand them or not, then it is our infantile mind trying to use God to give us a safer world of certainty and predictability. If it is our identity as a member of a certain religious group that is most important, then it is our childish mind wanting God to give us membership with the “chosen people,” who will protect and preserve us. And if our moral beliefs are ideologically driven, guided by a clear understanding of what is “good” and “bad,” then we are seeking rationality in the world, which might otherwise appear very irrational.

None of these needs or desires are “wrong.” The problem, which is the source of a great deal of the world’s hatred, violence, and suffering, is when many people are expressing an unhealthy, unintegrated mind by collectively creating and supporting a God that corresponds to their immature minds’ most harmful behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. 

Fortunately, the Grownup mind’s very purpose is to integrate our immature minds in a healthy way. When we look at God from our Grownup mind, it is a God that has compassion for the immature minds in ourselves and others and embraces them on the path to spiritual growth. When we create a Grownup God—which will be identical in nature to the ultimate God and will likely take many different forms as we learn to see such a Grownup God in all aspects of life—we integrate and transcend the immature Gods in a healthy way.

Immature Gods attract immature worshippers

Of course, we don’t each individually go around creating Gods to worship. A very few do create religions and (we would argue) their corresponding Gods, but most of us find—often in childhood through the God or Gods that our family and culture teach us are the right ones to follow—existing Gods to worship.

And isn’t this food for thought? If we find a God or Gods that seem “just right” to us during childhood, and they do not grow or change in any way as we get older, would it not follow that the odds are good that these Gods support a childish mentality in adulthood?

The Gods of Olympus were petty, quarrelsome, jealous, envious, lustful, temperamental, and violent; that is, immature. Hestia, the one exception, was—perhaps unsurprisingly—the unmarried virgin goddess of hearth and home. She maintained domestic harmony. As the maiden woman of the house, she had little prominence in the dramas of the more childish Gods, who had a lot of worshippers. 

Has it ever occurred to anyone that the kind of God a person worships says as much about the worshipper as it does about the God?¹ (See the Appendix below for examples of what happens when we worship immature Gods with our immature minds.)

So then, what are the immature Gods’ priorities that warrant all this worshipping? 

Immature Gods are patriotic. These Gods help nations win wars if the nation’s citizens and leaders please God. God shows displeasure with nations by causing them military defeats; however, defeats may represent painful, but valuable, lessons that God wants a nation to learn. Immature Gods believe that nations ought to worship them.

Immature Gods are disciplinarians. Punishments range from the corporal to the capital. Besides punishing whole nations at times, immature Gods also take time to endorse punishing individuals, including children. This God needs righteous law-and-order governments to punish adults, including killing them. And God depends on parents and teachers who believe that spankings are an indispensable tool for raising obedient children.

Immature Gods are sports fans, although they may only like a winner. Immature Gods love champions. A winning basketball shot at the buzzer or a miraculous catch for a winning touchdown is a sure sign that a team or an athlete is worthy of the blessings of victory. As winning athletes often say, “This is all thanks to God.” (The subconscious subtext being that God likes me, the winner, more than you, the loser.)

Immature Gods respect and confer wealth, success, and power. They like to be proud of their worshippers who know that God loves them when they have wealthy, successful, and powerful lives. God favors laws and economic schemes that help the chosen winners achieve and protect their great wealth, success, and power.² Immature Gods can only provide material prizes to their chosen ones, as they cannot give the spiritual fulfillment found through a relationship with a Grownup God.

Immature Gods love immortality. Immature Gods have the same highest values as the immature minds, and those values revolve around survival. Therefore, immortality is the greatest gift immature Gods believe they can bestow upon their worshippers.³ Immortality is the great compensation for having to spend our mortal life in this world. However, God can exclude people who don’t meet the necessary admission requirements.

Immature Gods are proprietary. The worshipper has to receive the blessings of the God by observing that God’s prescribed rituals, language, and theology. Many immature Gods do not accept transfers of previously earned religious credits from another God’s program of study. Furthermore, they can be quite harsh with dropouts. 

There is only one “right” immature God (or group of Gods). There may be many immature Gods, but each will say that they are the “right” one to worship. Are they all correct? It is this disturbing, but possible, conclusion that provokes the fear and anger of immature Gods and their immature worshippers more than anything else. Vicious religious wars have been fought, and continue to be fought, to prove that one immaturely worshipped religion is the true one while everyone else’s immaturely worshipped religions are false or evil.

If these are the traits of immature Gods, what kind of a God would the Grownup mind worship? 

How can we know a Grownup God?

A good starting point is to recognize that our God can be immature. It’s not enough just to feel inspired by our God, shivering with the exaltation of the divine presence. What does God want us to do? If it is to destroy artifacts of other religions, or kill worshippers of other Gods, then we must recognize that we are being commanded to obey an immature God. If we obey, then neither our God nor we will mature spiritually. If we repeatedly reject the command to be hateful, then we may leave enough space for a more mature version of God to enter our lives. As we become more mature and our God becomes more mature, our brain becomes healthier and more integrated. It takes a wholly integrated brain to know the holy integrated world of the Grownup God.

But we have to take an even closer look in the mirror. It may be easy to see that a God that calls on followers to kill all those who do not believe, or enslave them, is immature. Same for a God that hates all homosexuals, or women. But what if our God says that followers will go to heaven, implying that others may not. What does it mean if our God plays favorites, even without killing those who are not the favored ones? Can a God that dichotomizes at all, that separates into “us versus them,” even if that God seems to focus on the love of “us,” actually be a Grownup God? Or is such a splitting of the world, a failure to see the interconnected whole, a sign of immaturity? 

We would say that any division of beings takes us away from the truth known only to the Grownup mind. And if we are to live a Grownup life, and contribute to the Age of the Grownup, we must, if we worship a God or Gods, make sure they are Grownup ones.

A Grownup God in our lives does not divide people up into teams and then help them win football games or wars or political campaigns. A Grownup God does not use one part of humanity to rule or murder another part of humanity because of their less-than-humanness. A Grownup God sends us out to help heal other people into a more mature, humane way of life. A Grownup God spares the rod and sweetens the child with love before discipline, because discipline of a child is an act of cruelty if the child does not first feel loved. A Grownup God does not reward spiritual growth with financial growth. A Grownup God provides everything our spirit needs in this life without the promise of a “better” life after death. A Grownup God is not proprietary and is equally available to everyone everywhere.  A Grownup God would never send us out to do harm to any human being or living thing or the sea, air, or earth. A Grownup God is filled with, and fills us with, love.

That’s a God we would be willing to take responsibility for.

Our God is not responsible for us, we are responsible for our God

Billions of people live lives in contrary ways to how their God tells them to live. People do not typically blame God for their disobedience. At the same time, we cannot blame God for our obedience! It was not an acceptable moral excuse for the Holocaust that everyday citizens said, “I was just following orders.” Neither is it a spiritually acceptable excuse for us to behave hatefully, or even with a dichotomizing mind, because “God told me to.” 

What we believe is insignificant, compared to how we live because of what we believe. Religious piety, no matter how intensely experienced, does not excuse disrespectful, selfish, violent, cruel, or indifferent behavior toward other people, living creatures, and the earth. We must take responsibility for the God or Gods we worship!⁴

What if we find we are worshipping an immature God?

So, what do we do if we discover that we are worshiping an immature God? The beauty of the quadrune mind model, as a secular model of spirituality, is that we as humans can help our Gods to grow up, just as we can help each other grow up. We don’t have to take a supernatural God at face value. We can change the face of our Gods through our own Grownup mind. 

If we find that our God or Gods are appealing to our immature minds, we are called to find a way to modify our Gods, and modify our spiritual practice, so that it is for the benefit of all beings and the earth. The human brain tells us where our God wants us to go, more than the writings of religious leaders who may have themselves been writing, thinking, and acting from one of their immature minds. 

The path to a Grownup God is the same path to the Grownup mind in ourselves and others. It is to be loving, compassionate parenters to our own immature minds and those of others. And by becoming parenters ourselves, we are better able to understand and relate to a more compassionate parenter God (for example, as opposed to a strict disciplinarian God). We are called not only to create the conditions for the expression of the Grownup mind in ourselves and others, but also to create a world in which Grownup Gods can likewise flourish.

How do we create a world with more Grownup Gods?

When we give people the love and safety they need to heal their immature minds, it paves the way for them to engage in the world, including in the world of God, more and more from a Grownup level of consciousness. As that happens, their Gods will naturally grow up as a result. The solution isn’t to try to change our Gods first, because Gods are always a reflection of the level of consciousness of their worshipers. Even the most loving message can get misconstrued by the immature mind.

As Carl Rogers taught us, unconditional positive regard is the first step to change. It does not mean that we say that the great harm caused by an unhealthy, immature mind worshipping a similarly immature God (some examples of which are discussed below) is “okay.” Quite the contrary, as we begin to see the world more and more from our Grownup mind, we will be likewise more and more aware of just how devastating the effects of immature Gods can be on humanity and our world. But that does not mean our response is to hate people or their immature minds for worshipping such an immature God. When we understand the quadrune mind model and how it relates to God, we understand why not everyone can relate to a Grownup God—because they themselves still have growing up to do. And we don’t hate babies, children, or adolescents for their lack of maturity—we give them the support they need to continue their growth.

The same must be true in our relationships with other adults and our relationships with our own immature minds. The support that’s needed is the support of understanding, safety, compassion, and love. When we create the environment in which the Grownup mind can develop and thrive, then loving, universally compassionate, wise Gods will follow. These are the Gods that, like our own Grownup mind, can make this life a heaven on earth. 

Related Essays

QM and Moral (But Not Spiritual) Arguments for Killing Other People

Why Religious Fervor and Spiritual Consciousness Are Not The Same: (A Comparison of Two Religious Politicians, Josh Hawley and John Lewis, in Light of the Quadrune Mind Model)

Why Religion Doesn’t Encourage Us to Become Human

Experiencing a Nonproprietary God

Quadrune Mind: A Secular Spirituality for the 21st Century

When All Is Politics, We Are Not Human

Power or Strength: What Lord Acton Got Wrong

Resources

Rushkoff, D. (2019). Team human: Our technologies, markets, and cultural institutions—once forces for human connection and expression—now isolate and repress us. It’s time to remake society together, not as individual players but as the team we actually are. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. [Douglas Rushkoff’s brilliantly insightful book on how a human life is lived in a holistic world and how the powerful antihumanizing actions of immature people in power obstruct the spiritual development of our species. His description of moral sociocultural development through history corresponds perfectly with QM’s developmental model of spiritual development].

Wong, J. C. (April 10, 2026). Pete Hegseth’s holy war: the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran: Pete Hegseth as an armored knight on a rearing white horse at a cliff edge, with missiles and explosions in the sky: The Bible-thumping US defense secretary is overseeing another strategic disaster in the Middle East. Is this a war or a crusade? Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/10/pete-hegseth-christianity-iran-war-crusade.  

Appendix

Here are a few historical—and current—examples of the great suffering that some people believe has been sanctioned by God:

Some Jews and Christians have heard that God hates homosexuals so much that they should be put to death. In the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, which seemed to target homosexuals specifically, it was believed by some Christians that the epidemic was God’s punishment of homosexuality.

Some Muslims have heard that God may wish that anyone who depicts an image of the Prophet should be murdered, although this statement may not have been made explicitly.

Some Christians have heard God say that they have dominion over the earth, which gives them a mandate to use the world in any way they want, including to exploit it. Other Christians have heard God say that the earth belongs to God, and they are simply stewards of it. Both of these views fail to see humanity and the earth as interconnected and inseparable.

Some Christians have heard from God that Africans do not really qualify as human beings and could be owned like property. And if you can’t own them, you can at least tell them how to live without being lynched.

Some Christians continue to hear from God that African-Americans do not really qualify as human beings. Little babies born into their families do not deserve to have loving parents free to nurture them in peace. And, they do not deserve to be normal children who are sometimes silly, rambunctious, or tired without being prejudged as stupid, rebellious, or lazy. Neither do they deserve to be confident, successful adults without being prejudged as arrogant and uppity.

Some Israeli Jews have heard that God is impatient for them to kill off the Palestinian Muslims to reclaim the land that God had originally taken from the indigenous people to give to the Hebrews.

Some Christians heard that God wanted them to invade the Middle East in military crusades to reclaim Christian land from expanding military control by the Muslims.

Some Christians heard that God wanted them to take the spirit lands of the indigenous people of North America so that the Christian United States could span from the Atlantic to the Pacific. If Christians were God’s chosen people, then the preexisting claims of sacred land by the native people were invalidated by God.

Some Christians have heard that Jews can be used as kindling to spark Armageddon and then discarded to Hell after they’ve served their eschatological purpose. Along those lines, a Christian, who is expecting the Rapture to occur at any moment in his lifetime, gleefully said, “I can’t wait to see the faces on the Jews when they realize they have been wrong for two thousand years!”

Some Hindus have heard from God that it is more important to have a war with relatives than to fail in their responsibilities as a member of the warrior caste; for example, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. After all, the people killed in war will be reincarnated into another life anyway. And everyone must accept their caste roles in order to preserve the God-ordained orderliness of the universe.

Some Muslims believe that a martyr’s death testifies to a deep spiritual commitment to God and will result in bypassing the normal judgement of the dead, forgiveness for all previous sins, and other honors in the afterlife. Martyrdom refers to suffering death for a noble cause and does not include violent suicidal deaths in the killing of other people, although some Muslims may believe that it does.

Some Shintoists may have believed that their kamikaze death, or noble self-sacrifice, honored the spiritual essences, and their own families and country, when they flew their planes into American naval ships during WWII.

Some Christians and Jews have heard that women’s biology is unclean, including pregnancy, especially if giving birth to a girl. Men must keep their distance from women, not only during menstruation and childbirth but also preferably in school and church. Women are a distraction from the manly (man-to-Man) study of God.

Some Christians have heard that women are the cause of all sin in the world by a choice made thousands of years ago. A choice that is seen to deserve high esteem by other people.

Only a very immature God could be so filled with hatred that there is only enough room left to really love a few specially chosen favorites.

1. Yes. The 20^th century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” From the quadrune mind perspective, we would say that “good religion” helps prepare people to grow into spiritually mature Grownups. On the other hand, “bad religion” keeps people stuck in an immature level of consciousness. Similarly, Anne Lamott said, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” For these quotations and others that we believe relate to the quadrune mind perspective, see our Value Statements.
2. Plutarch made the following observations about events in Rome more than 2,000 years ago. Although humanity as a whole has shown tremendous spiritual growth since those years, the wealthy, as a class, have the resources to avoid growing up. And the destructive consequences of their immaturity are usually suffered severely, and regressively, by the masses. Plutarch describes two actions by the rich that precisely anticipate the 21st century United States—namely, the financial bailout of the bankers in the 2008 economic meltdown caused by the bankers and the use of military might to protect the fortunes of the wealthy: “Of the land which the Romans gained by conquest from their neighbors, part they sold publicly, and turned the remainder into common; this common land they assigned to such of the citizens as were poor and indigent, for which they were to pay only a small acknowledgement into the public treasury. But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer…. Afterwards the rich men of the neighbourhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession… The poor who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war or careful in the education of their children; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed in workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground of which they had displaced the citizens….

   “[After Tiberius Gracchus initiated new reforms to protect the poor], never did any law appear more moderate and gentle, especially being enacted against such great oppression and avarice. For [the rich] ought to have been severely punished for transgressing the former laws, and should at least have lost all their titles to such lands, which they had unjustly usurped…. [T]he people were only thankful to prevent abuses of the like nature for the future, yet, on the other hand, the moneyed men, and those of great estates, were exasperated, through their covetous feelings against the law itself, and against the lawgiver, through anger and party-spirit….

   “[Tiberius told the wealthy] that the commanders were guilty of a ridiculous error, when, at the head of their armies, they exhorted the common soldiers to fight for [the poor men’s] sepulchers and altars; when not any amongst so many Romans is possessed of either altar or monument, neither have they any houses of their own, or hearths of their ancestors to defend. They fought indeed and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of other men. They were styled the masters of the world but in the meantime had not one foot of ground which they could call their own.” [Excerpts from Plutarch’s lives: Tiberius Gracchus (163-133 B.C.). Benton, W. (Pub.). (1952). Plutarch: The lives of the noble Grecians and Romans: The Dryden Translation. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica. In Hutchins, R. M. (Ed. in Chief.). Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 14, pp. 674-675].

3. For example, John 11: 25-26, which says, “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?’” [This is not to say that we believe Jesus to be immature (quite the opposite), but rather that immature religious promoters of Christianity have turned his wisdom teachings into advertising campaigns. For example, these verses have been used by our local Time and Temperature call-in weather service (405-599-1234) as the Sunday scripture lesson for the past year or more. Apparently the sponsors of the message believe personal immortality is the best incentive for becoming a Christian].
4. An earlier version of this statement appears in the 80 Aphorisms from the Quadrune Mind Perspective.