The god Delusionmp3

Goliath told himself, ‘My spear will skewer this child like a….’ Thud

So ends the story of David and Goliath in a fantastic new book published by Scripture Union. Must Know Stories, written by Rob Harrison, is a creative retelling of some of the classic stories from the Bible. Many are written from the point of view of a central character, such as this one, which helps us see the depth of arrogance that pervades Goliath. Such pride is the fundamental human problem and it was amply displayed, with the accompanying downfall, in the first episode of The Apprentice which aired this week.

At the end of the program, as a taxi drove away with the first candidate to be fired by Sir Alan Sugar, the voice we hear declares, “I feel a certain amount of animosity towards Alex. I think that he knowingly destroyed my chances of succeeding in the competition. But I know that were it left to me, I would always succeed.” Such attitudes were not unusual for the current Apprentice intake, some of whom seem to take the notion of self-confidence to entirely new levels:

“If someone came up to me and said, ‘You’re arrogant’, I’d say, ‘You’re a 100% right, I am arrogant, and what are you going to do about it?’”
"As a sales person, I rate myself as probably the best in Europe."
“If I am faced with a situation that may cause, you know, mere mortals to quake. I don’t.”

Such confidence is not just limited to Apprentice candidates however. Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist, demonstrated a similar overblown rhetoric this week when she defended what the Bishop of Durham had called “secular utoptianism”: the belief in "the unstoppable human ability to make a better world”. While we all long for a better world, there is a huge difference between that hope – which is right - and the belief that humanity on its own has the capacity to achieve it. We are not the Saviour of the world, we are not God – and disasters tend to follow when we believe that we are. Just look at Iraq.

Where, then, does this sense of self-worship, this human idolatry, indeed this humanism, come from? Another of Rob Harrison’s reworked stories gives the answer:

If you eat that, you’ll die!
Don’t be silly. If we eat it, it will give us knowledge…we will become like the Creator. Oh, Adam, won’t it be wonderful to be like the Creator?

Irrespective of how literally we take the story of Adam and Eve, the truth that it proclaims has been ably demonstrated in the above stories. Our primary issue is pride – the desire to be like God, to act like God, to be God; the belief that everything is within our grasp, and that we need no-one else. “Were it left to me, I would always succeed” is not just the false belief of a failed Apprentice candidate, it is the delusion to which all humans are drawn when they try to take God’s place. And that is the real god Delusion.

Justin Thacker, Head of Theology

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