But it's not true, blurted Sam, unable to keep quiet. "'What I say ten times is true.' That's one of our Proverbs. We teach the young men to fill the… - Sheri S. Tepper

I say the entities that are named as gods by Earthians are imagined into being by Earthians as personal helper-buddies, justifiers, threateners (my god can beat up your god). They don't "run on" anything any more than a mirror image "runs on" anything. They merely reflect what people want them to be. "I want to have more children than my brother does, thus proving I'm a better man than he is, so my god tells me I should have a big family." "I want to screw women, so my god is going to give me seventy virgins I can screw for all eternity." The "gods" in The Margarets who could really do anything were actually an old, highly evolved race of real people. The others were only reflections. The real God, who may really exist, is outside all that, perhaps watching closely, perhaps merely asleep for a few trillion years while the experiment runs out. We — thee and me as individuals — will never know that God, though after a few trillion years, the universe as a whole may come to understand that God.

Duty was simply not enough. There had to be more than that!

It is far more important to establish a civil and orderly society than it is to pander to abusive cultural and religious artifacts.