What's... God... got to do with it? (Feb 2011)

I guess that most of us are asking ourselves questions about God during our entire life. Me, I keep wondering why we do that
Why do we feel something called God is or can be important in our lives? I’m not talking about religion in itself, because that’s another matter, things like power over others, a sense of belonging to a community, and other reasons can creep up, reasons that don’t necessarily apply when we consider God on a very personal note.
I can think of some reasons to need a God-ish presence in our lives: a reassurance that someone will reward the right and punish the wrong (better than our justice systems or whatever), a feeling that there might be a purpose to life if someone else – much more intelligent and powerful than us – decided that we should exist, a protective presence, someone who can help when nothing else can… Maybe other reasons as well.
What bothers me with this is that:

• we should be able to define – for ourselves – what right and wrong means, without any 20-commandments, coming from someone else
• we should be able to find a purpose to our lives without just saying “there must be one, even if I don’t know it”
• we should not need protection from a “superior” person (especially as it’s not obvious we have it anyway)
• the only thing that can help us is … well, us.

Or is it?
I guess that’s bugging me more than anything else, the fact that we (as one of Earth species) believe we can’t be owners of our lives, of our choices, of our value systems. We much rather rely on others for that, even if others can easily manipulate us with this.
As a trainer said a couple of days ago: when we fail, we externalize the causes (it rained, I was unlucky, others cheated…). We need a plan-B in case something is not the way we want it to be. It can’t be our decision, our responsibility, it must be someone else’s.