Psychologists discuss the following.
Suppose you are a narcissist.
You have a grandiose self-image. Your wonderfulness is exaggerated. Paradoxically, if you think you are the worst in the world, you are still saying you are extremely important. You are so great that the mistakes you think you have made matter more than anything else in the world.
A tension will arise for you cannot become a complete loner and others will not see you as you see yourself. Your image of yourself is untrue so you need others to appear to agree with it, so you can hold on to the lies.
You need validation outside of you to keep up how you validate yourself. You will find people to play along with your delusion. Those people will not be there all the time to supply it. So what do you do? Clearly you will have a version of God to fill the void.
It does not matter if this is an explicit faith or something more vague. It has to be there.
Anyway, this God will either be so forgiving that nothing bad you do really matters. All that matters to God is how great you are, he is willing to just wipe the slate clean to express that.
Or he will flat out agree with what you are doing. Any harm done will be seen as being for some kind of purpose. You surmise that a celestial reward must be waiting for you.
Also, God is defined as the supreme infinite being who is interested in you and how wonderful you are.
Suppose you believe in Satan. Even if you do find serious flaws in yourself, you turn them into a self-compliment. Now Satan the greatest evil in the universe is paying you attention.
You have found your perfect givers of status symbols. They help you give them to yourself.
You will involve others in this too.
Your outrageous attitudes will be hidden from others in order to keep the charade up. People tend to be private to an extent about their spiritual relationships. The hiding will happen anyway and a lot of it will be deliberately concealed.
Now we must connect our discoveries, to the origin of narcissism. No two people will become narcissists for exactly the same reasons.
But generally speaking it can come from those:
Genetic predispositions.
Parents excessively praising you in childhood.
Parents being inconsistent with care and discipline.
By the way, that helps orientate to vulnerable narcissism. We touched on that type above when we noticed that your exaggerating your alleged wrongs is a sign of navel-gazing pride. You wallow for you don't consider others worthy of attention.
I would add that once you are taught to think that you are getting inspirations from God or Satan, you will perceive them as being excessively on your side or inconsistent. The notion of divine guidance is central to what Christianity, Islam and Judaism are about. You have to know this guidance is unreliable. You deal with that by saying it is reliable despite appearances. Or that they really are inconsistent. You think they see into your inner being. That empowers how the notions of God and Satan effect you. So what parents can do to you, will happen faster under God or Satan.
If God and Satan are not interested in you, thinking they are will make it no better or worse than if they really are.
You will tend to exaggerate your success and to think it is all your own doing. The other side of that is you are saying that others fail and that is all their own doing. You see no point in helping them for you think they will not benefit.
People will point out that compassion and humility arise from seeing that life is a lottery and that lottery allowed your success to come about. It is contingent on many things you have no control over. Hard work alone will not do it.
That does not work. You will then reason, "I made the lottery my own. I took the opportunities." The implication is that those who got a bad lot in life were too lazy or stupid to see that they didn't have to put up with it.
I would add there is taking the chance to better yourself and then there is the notion that if you open yourself up to God chances will fall into your lap. So you just take and then you take indirectly by praying.
If life really does deal some a bad hand, you have two reasons then to look down on them.
Compassion and humility are lied about. To sustain them, it is necessary to pretend that one does not think that the unfortunate are to blame for their own troubles. If they thrive on lies then how real are they?
I would add that the way your body responds to trauma as if nothing worse is happening out there to somebody, shows that it is remarkable if you don't end up a narcissist. Also, the way you are closed off from others, you are you and they are they, causes a disconnect. Your body is like your house and there is a ghost floating in the attic. You are physically separate and mentally. The way you are is no help when it comes to avoiding narcissism. Or it helps bring it about.
Maybe we will look at this another way to make a nuanced point. The one thing I cannot doubt is that I exist. That is out of Descartes. I feel that. I also know it. Feeling and knowing such a thing makes me likely to put myself first. The odds are stacked against me if I want to love another as myself. If I am not a narcissist, that does not change the fact that I am made like a narcissist, or a person that should be one.
Males tend to be narcissistic towards women. Their talk and behaviours demonstrate that. Statistically, most sexual assault and violence is waged against women - by men.
Read the book Rage becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly. Chapter 2 covers a study performed in 2012. Males were undergoing a brain scan. Images of women were shown to them. The part of the male brain that reacted the most was the part that indicates perceiving a mere object. While it is a bit more complicated than saying that men see women as mere inanimate trinkets, the test showed how how men have an inbuilt sexist narcissistic element. No male is fully a respecter of female.
This has implications for males who support religions with female saints such as the Virgin Mary or even female deities such as Radha. They could be fetishising those entities. And a God who is viewed through a male lens even if he is genderless in theory is a male's validation of his own sex with all its darkness and light. It is an oblique attack on women.
Christianity, Judaism and Islam hold that God set up marriage for woman to be loved, among other reasons. Males will hide their true feelings and use God and religion as cover. Religion is a cover full stop anyway so that is not surprising. Marriage, the family based on it, is the core unity of religion so religion at its very heart is a disgrace.
Conclusion:
In the narcissist’s world, God and Satan are not sources of moral challenge or transformation, but rather props that reinforce an inflated, fragile self-image. Whether the narcissist sees themselves as divinely chosen or demonically targeted, both serve to center the universe around the self. These figures become tools for validation—God becomes an ever-forgiving admirer, Satan a flattering enemy, and both are imagined to be deeply concerned with the narcissist’s internal drama. This spiritual theater masks a deeper alienation from others and a refusal to accept human equality and fallibility. Religion, in this view, becomes less about humility or compassion and more about concealing egocentrism and entitlement, especially when filtered through the lens of male dominance and cultural conditioning. In the end, the narcissist doesn’t worship God or fear Satan—they worship their own reflection, cloaked in sacred symbols.