The Atheist Richard Dawkins entitled his most famous book, The God Delusion, to make the point that those who believe in God are deluded. While I disagree with his premise, I do appreciate the title, but not in a way that he would endorse. Richard Dawkins is right; there is a God delusion, but it doesn’t refer to those who believe in a non-existent God; but rather to the 7 billion inhabitants of this planet who have a God-complex.

You don’t have to look very far to find evidence for our divine delusion. We get bent out of shape when we have to wait in line like common mortals for our divine Starbuck’s elixir. We blame the government for being slow to react when our temples are destroyed by natural disaster. We take divine credit for our success but feel we must kick our fellow human beings to the curb when things don’t go our way. We lash out at others who seem oblivious to our celestial significance.  Interestingly, our deistic aspirations don’t just cause trouble for our fellow man but they also create inner turmoil because we quickly find we cannot live up to our own standard and spend the rest of our lives unable to forgive ourselves. In the end, we don’t act like smart monkeys but rather like put-upon gods.

It’s an absurdity in the extreme, but we continue to fuel this celestial charade by surrounding ourselves with like-minded god wanna-be’s. We give a nod and a wink to our fellow man by tolerating their faux celestial reign as long as it doesn’t flood our personal throne room. We believe we have created a divine democracy but end up living in a land of a thousand fakes forced to pay tribute to Lord Tolerance. We maintain the deception by sweeping our human resume of war, genocide, and oppression under the rug as if it were dust from our evolutionary past. But our divine deception has been exposed; our sinful antics have been Wikileaked. What can we do? We have a choice; we can accept our status as fallen human beings or foolishly blame our tarnished divine image on Christian hackers.

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3: 4-5)

The serpent in the Garden penned the original God delusion and we continue to read from its pages. Instead of trying to return to Eden and sit at God’s feet, we establish our own pretentious principalities in the frigid wilderness warmed only by our own hot air.  We complement one another on our newly acquired emperors wardrobe oblivious to the fact that we are nothing more than a colony of divinely challenged nudists with surprisingly little to protect us from the cold harsh reality of flawed mortality.

God recognized this problem and began the Ten Commandments with, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Sadly, we exchanged the truth for a lie and worshipped the created rather than the Creator. We remained monotheists but ended up venerating only ourselves.  The Good News is that Jesus became an obedient polyanthropist and nailed the original sin of divine pomposity to the cross for all of mankind. Ironically, the God of the universe had to man up in order to snap us out of our God delusion.

So the next time you get on your high horse remember that He came riding on a foal, and when you try and fill your divine glass to the brim remember that He emptied Himself on your behalf.  It never ends well when man becomes God but it does when God becomes man.

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshiper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and maim him forever. (G.K. Chesterton)