Say we assume humans are more important than any god, that would mean at any point in history, whichever human can scam, coax, con, bully or even positively lead his fellow humans, will be considered the equivalent of a God to the rest. The equation would be; since man is higher than God and this man/women is the highest of all the humans; He is the God to the Gods. This is a sure recipe for failure; since you will get more duds than dudes. You will get one Solomon for every ten duds.
Assuming that Solomon wasn't a dud, which he probably was (if he existed at all).
God, as an abstraction allows all of us to imagine and discuss what would be needed, in terms of ideal character traits, so when all the duds come along, we don't fall back as far. Also we can use this ideal to inspire more and more dudes to rise and help humans move forward.
Yes, I kind of like that idea. We form the idea of virtuous character traits and imagine what ideal individuals would be like that possess them. And we do that concretely rather than abstractly, imagining hypothetical imaginary characters the possess all the virtues and qualities that we consider ideal.
These imaginative personifications of the maximization of our own human values and virtues would be better than any of us simply by definition, since they possess all the virtues that we believe make people better, without the inevitable limitations and qualifiers that we find in every real-life individual.
We can still create an ideal, like blessed are the poor, without the idea of a God. However, this is not the same thing. The reason is, human leaders as the God of Gods, will attempt to change the ideal to maximize their own reign. For example, free speech is an ideal but some leaders will use PC to set limits on this ideal because this less than ideal will maximized them and their cronies. This is a step backwards.
I agree with you that imagining a flawed human being as being the personification of absolute unquestionable goodness gives license to that divinized individuals' inevitable character flaws. That becomes doubly true if it becomes socially unacceptable to criticize the demi-god.
If the ideal is assumed to stem from God, this can't be overridden as easy by any leader, because a subordinate human can't boss the boss.
Personifying our own human flaws and blowing them up into idealized cosmic virtues has similar dangers, especially when the product of that inflation becomes immune from criticism. The god of the Hebrew old testament is something of a monster, commanding genocide, murder and intolerance. But questioning him turns into the essence of sin and unquestioning obedience becomes the ideal. So the early Hebrews who worshipped him transformed themselves into an ancient incarnation of the horrors of ISIS.
The ideal remains, to stand the test of time. With that goal always fixed and unchanging, humans get closer to a better world.
But what if our idealized personification of virtue is fatally flawed? What if it embodies the values of a crude and primitive society?
If our ideal is fixed and unchanging for all time, how can it ever evolve into something better?
Isn't evolution in the concept of God precisely what we see in the Bible? The monster-god of 1Samuel has some ethics injected into him by the prophets, and by the time we arrive at Jesus, God has become 'love'. That's a far cry from ordering the total extermination of a neighboring tribe, men, women, children and even their animals, or ordering death for daughters that have premarital sex.
The atheist do not know how to peacefully accommodate the faithful even if this represents billions of human beings.
Who are you addressing?
Their solution is to make it easier for themselves by outlawing what bothers them.
I'm an atheist. What do I supposedly want outlawed?
That is a step backwards because man as leader and new god of the gods will change the rules for themselves and their cronies. He will forget the ideal of all living in peace and choice.
I'm inclined to think that if it's so easy for you to create a mental caricature of 'the atheist', it's probably even easier to project a mental caricature of God into the sky, a caricature created out of our own desires. There's no reality to compare that heavenly projection against so as to judge its suitability and veracity, as there is with real-life atheists like me.