God is transcendant or wholly other or some other extreme word for different. The big temptation is to creat a false god–one who is false because he is like us rather than being totally transcendant and different.
That’s the typical story
But pagans hardly ever make gods like themselves. More often they make gods like animals or half-humans or use giant phallic symbols. They think these things represent some sort of power within them, the part that is really important to who they are. Even when they made gods that were replica humans, they were static–stone or wood.
The pagan philosophers also make god out to to be different. Their god was some sort of thought, Spirit, or intellect.
In all these things human life is rejected in favor of some tiny part of human life. Everything else is extraneous.
But from the very beginning the Bible declares war on such idols by saying that we are like God and he like us. God is a society who wants our society and made us as society to reflect him. The point is emphasized when God comes to us as one of us in Jesus. And God is with us, not in pictures or in retreats from life, but in life itself, in childbearing and work and singing and eating together an all the rest.
With all its problems, I do hope that post-modernity can be for the Church a twilight of the idols.
On a related note, in the Old World, the temptation for God’s people (and pagans) was always to use animals/angels as false idols (Egyptian gods, golden calf, etc.).
Idolatry is different in the New World. Seems to me that ever since Christ, the temptation for those who have encountered him is to raise up a false messiah as idol. We have a temptation to bow to a man. This manifests itself in a number of ways. There are Christians who revere a given theologian and follow his every word (Rushdoony, Wilson, Sproul, Calvin, Wright, Jordan, etc.). There are Christians who look to political figures (George W.). The pope became a false messiah in late medieval theology. The late medieval kings were explicitly spoken of and depicted as messiahs. Seems that that is our temptation. What does breaking the Second Commandment look like in our day? Bowing down to a man.