I don’t think you do necessarily… if you’re very clever, honest, empathetic and/or honourable, but it will certainly keep you more accountable and remorseful even in that case! And for the vast majority of people, who simply don’t have any of those qualities to the necessary degree to competently move around in the world righteously, belief in God and fear of the Day of Judgment will be the main/only barrier to stop them from transgressing greatly. It would certainly help in this amoral, self-serving, anti-intellectual, post-truth USA, for example (and don’t say these people believe in what Jesus believed in or anything like that, cause any cursory reading of the Sermon on the Mount could show you these so called religious people don’t conduct themselves in any prosocial, selfless way, nor do the believe God will judge them for their atrocities/troublemaking).
So why do you need an external creator to believe in them?
I don’t think you do necessarily… if you’re very clever, honest, empathetic and/or honourable, but it will certainly keep you more accountable and remorseful even in that case! And for the vast majority of people, who simply don’t have any of those qualities to the necessary degree to competently move around in the world righteously, belief in God and fear of the Day of Judgment will be the main/only barrier to stop them from transgressing greatly. It would certainly help in this amoral, self-serving, anti-intellectual, post-truth USA, for example (and don’t say these people believe in what Jesus believed in or anything like that, cause any cursory reading of the Sermon on the Mount could show you these so called religious people don’t conduct themselves in any prosocial, selfless way, nor do the believe God will judge them for their atrocities/troublemaking).