If there is one expression that makes me gag in disbelief at the sheer amount of pompous, delusional self-aggrandizement then it would be

having a personal relationship with god.

First, what should we think of a person who claims to have a relationship with a deity? Doesn’t that immediately disqualify them from any further discourse? If someone in earnestly tells you a god is their personal friend, they are conceited jackasses, or are playing with only half a deck of cards. Probably both.

Just what goes through the mind of someone who feels they have to tell you something like this? It’s the ultimate name-dropping – is it even possible to appear more desperate in seeking attention? Just by itself, personal relationship with god is such a cringe-inducing, pathetic statement that I have difficulties hiding my contempt, and I usually have to avert my eyes.

Have you ever paused to think what this person, in all honesty is trying to tell you – what they have convinced themselves of, and what they want you to believe: that they regularly converse with a super-being; that this being not only exists, but that it takes their moronic views [Note: if you are a super being, all human thoughts are moronic by default – its intelligence would see past all our petty self interests and there would be nothing interesting we could contribute in an exchange of ideas with it] serious – and that this being offers personal insight, solace, and advice.

It gets worse: if we were to allow for all this to be true, we’d have to contend with the fact that even though these people regularly converse with a super-being, all advice and information they receive is stupid, ordinary, and banal: not one believer with a personal relationship to their god has ever shown to have supernatural understanding of, or brilliant insight into anything. So this super-being is either not very smart, or deliberately feeding its counterpart bad information. Which means that you have a personal relationship with an über-prankster, a being that continually has jokes on your account.

So, just by looking at the record we know that bragging about a personal relationship with gods is a sure way to get you and your god ridiculed – for good, documented reason.

Yet that is only half of what makes the expression so fundamentally stupid. Let’s say that we agree that the person claiming to have a relationship with god is not stark raving mad. This means that they tacitly agree that it’s more likely to have a relationship with a pet rock than an entity that nobody ever saw or could be proven to exist. A pet rock you can at least hold in your hand – but it would never answer to any kind of interaction. Yet, any sane relationship requires interaction from both sides. What would you think about a person who earnestly tells you they have a relationship with a rock? Wouldn’t you think them at least a bit pitiful?

What, then, would you think of a person who tells you that they have a relationship with a pet rock that you can’t see, touch, feel or otherwise detect?

But it’s the personal bit, the utter ridiculousness of the insinuation that the relationship is based on personal exchange that makes it such a tragically pathetic proposition, so impossible to accept. Because, let’s face it, it’s not personal until the object of your relationship responds to your individual communication, in ways curtailed to you. Everyone knows that when gods talk to you, you have gone mad. So again, there is tacit agreement that, clinical cases aside, in this ‘personal relationship’ the other side has never, ever, responded. And yet these people call it a personal relationship.

So why are they doing it? Pompous self-importance perhaps. Trying to impress the easily impressed probably. In many cases, they have been told this idiocy by other believers – and repeat it now in vain hope that if they say it often enough they would someday believe it themselves.

Just sad.