Dr. Ben Carson, who's running for the vice-presidential slot on the 2016 Republican ticket, today openly confessed to a rather severe case of psychosis:
I realized that God probably had something special he wanted me to say [at last year's presidential prayer breakfast]. But I didn’t know what it was until the morning of the prayer breakfast. After a while of wrestling with it, I just said, I’m leaving it alone, the Lord will tell me what to say. And that morning, it was so clear in my mind what I was supposed to say.
Which was this. Amid the Creator's daily management headaches of a 14-billion-year-old universe, one expanding and popping with hundreds of billions of sometimes-colliding galaxies, what He'd really like to see is a ... flat tax.
Dr. Carson is shittin' us not. That's what the Almighty told him that morning; blessed are those who would flat-tax each other on that infinitely obscure little speck of dust which its inhabitants call Earth. The Creator desires not more love, nor more peace, nor even, say, a few gun-control laws so that, for Christ's sake, innocent children are less slaughtered on the streets of urban America. No, the Prime Mover tells Carson that He wants a fucking flat tax.
I, uh, have some reservations about this conversation having ever taken place. A flat tax seems sort of, well, you know, small of the Big Guy. But that Carson actually heard the non-existent half of the conversation squares nicely with Bart Ehrman's section on spectral delusions, in How Jesus Became God. Indeed there seems to be a racing pandemic of such delusional thinking throughout the Republican Party. Every contender for the presidential nomination is praying like hell for guidance, and I can almost guarantee you that God will give each and every one of them a huge thumbs-up (which reminds me a bit of FDR's management style, which, upon further reflection, is rather fitting).
The upshot? Carson needs to enlarge his delusions; to go bigger--much bigger. The Christian right will swallow psychoses about God as a campaign manager. But delusions about a God who looks not like Charlton Heston, but Steve Forbes? No that definitely lacks a certain grandeur.