Quotes About Idolatry

We are images of God. When we venerate images, we're not merely exchanging the glory of God for the glory of creation. We give up our own glory. We're alienated from our own vocation.

They stopped their ears and refused to listen to their ministers, and they ceased to correct and admonish one another and their children, choosing instead, greed, privacy, independence, and idolatry.

The event testified to within Christianity is evident in a life that has been freed from an idolatrous existence that turns us from the world to an iconic engagement with the world.

The teacher here is the one who says, "You will do greater things than I." This teacher stays only for a season so that the words, which act as bridge to truth, do not become a blockage to it, and so that their iconic presence does not morph into an idolatrous one. Thus, we can say that a total and complete fidelity to our teacher, an unthinking devotion to her words, will always end up being nothing but a betrayal.

The primary problem with idolatry is not that it falsely claims to have a connection with God but rather that it falsely claims to understand the God that it is connected to. Yet this does not mean that our definitions of God are somehow unimportant – indeed, they remain vital – it is only that we must recognize the extent to which these reflections fall short of that which they attempt to define and always reflect something of the one who makes the claims.

Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?

Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.

When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.

Iblis was the first False Salafi, a literalist whose obsessive misunderstanding of monotheism and of the avoidance of idolatry took him far from spiritual wisdom.

O my people! Ye have indeed wronged yourselves by your worship of the calf: so turn (in repentance) to your Maker, and slay yourselves (the wrongdoers); that will be better for you in the sight of your Maker.

Sun, moon, and stars beckon people to worship the Creator—until people lose sight of the living God and begin to worship the sun, moon, and stars themselves.

Nevertheless, in whatever form idolatrous religion appeared, precisely because it was derived from the external, and increasingly lost the factor of spiritual revelation, it could develop in no other way than in visible forms.

15For your own sake, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no shape when the Lord your God spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire—16not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever:

Numa forbade the Romans to revere an image of God which had the form of man or beast. Nor was there among them in this earlier time any painted or graven likeness of Deity, 8 but while for the first hundred and seventy years they were continually building temples and establishing sacred shrines, they made no statues in bodily form for them, convinced that it was impious to liken higher things to lower, and that it was impossible to apprehend Deity except by the intellect.

More worship the rising than the setting sun.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Luck is the idol of the idle.

When a man makes a reverent face before a face that is no face — that is idol worship.

Brahmos accept a formless deity who is invisible to the eye. You accept idols who cannot be heard. We acccept the living who can be seen and heard-- it's impossible not to believe in them.

The time has come when I must divest Bimala of all the ideal decorations with which I decked her. It was owing to my own weakness that I indulged in such idolatry. I was too greedy. I created an angel of Bimala, in order to exaggerate my own enjoyment. But Bimala is what she is. It is preposterous to expect that she should assume the role of an angel for my pleasure. The Creator is under no obligation to supply me with angels, just because I have an avidity for imaginary perfection.

We considered the Dear Leader our god. That's huge. He's more than our parents. I thought all of the world respected Kim Il Sung. That's why we were bowing to their pictures.

Piously we produce our images of you till they stand around you like a thousand walls. And when our hearts would simply open, our fervent hands hide you.

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald.