SELF-IDOL as an expression and MAKING IT A SYNONYM FOR ATHEIST

Atheism is making an idol of yourself instead of some idea of God. Religion says it is making yourself a god instead of God.  That is true but only if there is a God.  And even if there is a God, if people only have their idea of him he may as well not exist as far as they are concerned.

God is not an idea.  So atheists and believers both then have an idol.  The atheist ditches the god idea idol which is embraced by the religionist.

Religion sees the atheist as dropping God for a replacement god.  In saying that it is not saying it believes you think it can hear your prayers, be with you, give you life after death or magical blessings.  If you assume a person is made for God and they don't respect or worship him then you will say they replace him with a religious idol or something else that is only an idol in the sense that you fill the god hole with it.  So it is not necessarily an obvious or significantly religious idol as in religious or spiritual.  If God makes us for ourselves or does not exist then the idol is not an idol in any metaphorical or literal sense but is just what we put first. It is a figure of speech.

By dropping any suggestion that you should worship a God, you are putting yourself and your needs first. It's not about being spiritual or religious. It is about your needs being your needs. Your needs are your identity because by definition as a person you are about having needs. A less extreme view is that nobody else can choose for you therefore you by default do your own choosing and put yourself first.

If being morally good is of such great importance and God helps you be moral and teaches morality and is the authority that gives it its binding force then what if you are atheist?  To say you will have a justice and love of your own is still standing for justice and love.  If you say there is no morality you are saying the loving and fair thing is to deny them so you are back where you started.  You are inherently forced to attempt justice and love meaning you can get it wrong and thus you are the cause of a distortion not guilty of evil. Sin is nonsense and a vicious nonsense.  God only matters if sin matters and sin matters only if God matters. 

Free will, if you have it, only distorts but you need to be distorted in the first place.   A God might not be to blame if x defies God's grace to do harm.  But God is to blame for he damages your faculties that you make mistakes.  Sin then is nonsense.

All atheism is is recognising your identity.  You are the one who cannot sin and who does not need a God's authority for you to affirm justice and love.