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Alive with Steve Burns

Why Do We God? with Professor Leela Prasad

Alive with Steve Burns

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture

5.0588 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Leela chats with Steve as he wonders about the different ways humans worship.   Leela Prasad is St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. In 2024, she was elected as the first South Asian female president of the American Academy of Religion. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships for the study of religion, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright-Nehru senior fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.   Head to ComicConTheCruise.com/ALIVE to learn more and book your cabin — and don’t forget to use code ALIVE for $250 off per cabin on new reservations!   To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com/alive.   Look for the blue box at retailers everywhere or shop jlab.com and use code ALIVE for 15% off your order today.Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/stevealive. You can follow Steve Burns @steveburnsalive on Instagram. Watch full episodes of Alive on YouTube. Stay up to date with Lemonada on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.    If you haven’t yet, now is a great time to subscribe to Lemonada Premium. You’ll get ad-free episodes and bonus content from Steve. Just hit the 'subscribe' button on Apple Podcasts, or, for all other podcast apps head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe.    Click this link for a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this show and all Lemonada shows: lemonadamedia.com/sponsors See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Lemonada

0:02.0

Hey there you are.

0:03.0

Come on in.

0:20.0

It's good to see you. Uh, welcome you are. Come on in. It's good to see you. Welcome to Alive.

0:23.6

Okay, take a deep breath. This is a big one. Do you believe in God. Yeah, okay, fair.

0:44.3

That is a huge question, right?

0:48.3

But we tend to talk about these things, death and sex and taxes taxes and it's almost like we're dancing around

0:55.3

the biggie the big cheese the OG God I'm making tea you want tea it's have tea

1:04.6

and I don't mean the capital G intercedent anthropomorphic god sitting on a cloud somewhere

1:14.9

smiting people and, you know, painting sunsets and inventing the platyposed or something.

1:23.4

I'm talking about the small G God, the idea, you know?

1:32.3

The impulse, the story, really.

1:40.3

Because if you step back far enough, it's pretty easy to see that all cultures across all ages of humanity have some story of something larger than themselves to worship.

1:55.0

Here you go. To blame, to bargain with, to... I don't know.

2:02.2

It just seems that we do have some sort of God-shaped hole

2:05.8

at the center of our existence that we are compelled

2:09.0

to fill with all of the very big things,

2:12.8

like love and fear and hate and mercy and hope. And my question is, why do we God?

2:32.9

Why do we God?

2:40.0

Yeah.

2:44.0

Come on.

2:47.0

Okay.

...

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