When the worship of God is just a way of being selfish

"If people can have their needs met without religion, they often will." James Lindsay.

MY THOUGHT: IF RELIGION IS ABOUT MY NEEDS THEN MY DEVOTION TO GOD IS ABOUT ME - IT IS MY MERCENARY SIDE.  THE GOD I WORSHIP IS THAT SIDE OF ME.

God is not going to confirm what you say about him and what you feel about him.  This relationship is all one-sided for you are the one deciding what God is and what he is like and how you are connecting.

When your God is your creation, you are adoring what you want him to be not what he is. You are preferring your desires to the real God if he exists. In truth, you are worshipping yourself and indirectly worshipping the Devil who likes or who you think likes this. When you believe in God without evidence you are worshipping what you have imagined - a mental idol. It is something that works on some psychosocial level.  It is a mental construction - a notion.  Maybe you call it something that you need to help make sense of your life and existence.  But that making sense is not possible no matter how much you tell yourself different.  Using something that should not make sense of it for life should make its own sense to you is self-abuse.  When you are in love with someone you don’t know, you are in love with what you imagine that person to be and not the person in reality. It is the same with God.  It is a waste of love.  Loving a crutch to fit your social and emotional and whatever needs is inherently demeaning and inflicts things such as confirmation bias and optimism bias on yourself.  Optimism bias in religion often takes the cruel form of, "I will always have faith".  Tell that to yourself if you end up with depression.  What message are you sending to others for we all influence each other!

During the coronavirus crisis of 2020, the media uncovered a lot of instances where Christians defied social distancing rules and went to Church and spread the virus. How somebody could want to worship so much even if it kills themselves and others is a mystery.  It is totally contradictory to going to serve a being who represents sacrifice and love.  Answers are that they secretly adore an idol in their heads in the place of God that suits themselves or they think they are miraculously protected.  Or maybe it is just a symptom of God worship.  Maybe like the coronavirus, it is bad to have it even if it does no harm for the simple reason that it will harm and kill some people.  Maybe God belief is a coronavirus!

It is easier for people to throw their idols out on to the dump than it is to drive out the idols in their heads and imagination.
 
Religious people often believe and/or act as if good is a person and that person is God. They inconsistently treat God as goodness one minute and as a person the next. It is like they call rules good and worship the rules in the form of God. We can engage in reification. Reification would be when you think that something that is merely an idea is a real thing. For example, take justice. It is not a thing. We always have to try and stop ourselves from thinking it is! The risk of reification is very great for our minds do not really like thinking in abstract terms and it leaves us emotionally cold. You would need to be extremely devoted to God and able to provide incredible evidence for his existence to avoid suspicion of reification. In fact a believer should be assumed to be engaged in reification until proven otherwise. An excellent example of something akin to reification takes place when Catholics pretend that a wafer is Jesus Christ. To say something becomes Jesus without changing is pretending.
 
Though a morality based on rules is callous when there is no attention paid to the individual case, the morality is STILL callous if it does. Why? Because the motivation is to fulfil a rule and not a person even if the person benefits. To worship good as God is to worship evil and that worship manifests and thrives on our selfishness.
 
WHY YOU CANNOT BLAME THE INVENTORS OF GOD ONLY
 
If a man invents a God or a version of God, and a religion worships and preaches this God even centuries later in one sense it worships the man’s creation. It treats the man's doctrines about God as God. It worships an idol made from doctrine. It adores not God but how God is seen. Whether there is a real God or not that is what is happening. That is one sense. In another sense it worships it own creation for it participates in and enables his inventing and his invention. It invents again what was invented before. It renews his invention and makes it its own. Man does not invent God and get others to worship. He gets others to invent with him.

FINALLY

We conclude that the person who worships God, worships himself or herself by proxy.