Quotes About Idolatry

Idolatry is thus the hidden sin driving all other sins.

We sin because we want something in the created world more than we want the Creator.

Como Paulo diz em Romanos, se você rejeitar o Deus da Bíblia, irá deificar algo dentro da ordem criada. Aqueles que não honram ao Deus transcendente além do cosmos, devem divinizar algum poder ou princípio imanente que pertence ao cosmos.

Quando alguma parte da criação é absolutizada, tudo é redefinido em seus termos. Os humanos são reformulados à sua imagem.

God cannot be rejected without putting something else in his place.

John Calvin defines idolatry as worshipping "the gifts in place of the giver himself.

To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.

The mainspring of sin is not that we have bodies but that we put things besides God at the center of our lives and turn them into idols.

When God gives people up to their idols, the result is always a reductionistic view of humanity—which ultimately unleashes harmful and destructive behavior. When we reduce people to anything less than fully human, we will treat them as less than fully human. When we define God as a something instead of a Someone, we will tend to treat humans as somethings too.

Writing in the context of racial prejudice—as one who marched with Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel argued that prejudice is atheism, "a treacherous denial of the existence of God." In other words, prejudice negates any pretence of trying to believe in a God who claims to have made all people in His image. Heschel continues, "Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.

At the sight of their heroes and heroines, the crowd would turn demoniac. Some little gesture, either too pleasing or too offensive, would start it moving and then nothing but machine guns would stop it. Individually the purpose of its members might simply to be to get a souvenir, but collectively it would grab and rend.

Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.

She demanded, "Give up your life of idolatry and become a doctor." I declined. "I have my geraniums to look after.

Humanity is the only totally false god.

Love can only take place where a relationship is free from idolatry and a person recognizes God as the source of everything. The moment we look to someone to be the source of supplying our happiness or comfort, we put them in the place of God. At that point, loving that person with the love of God becomes an impossibility. Your theological foundation is crucial to your growth in love. What you believe about God dictates your perspective and attitudes toward people and circumstances in life.

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

One altar forever is preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol,--ourselves, our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him; we boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is matter that has forever enslaved us.

Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires. Shrine after shrine has crumbled before our eyes; but one altar is forever preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol, - ourselves. Our God is great, and money is his Prophet!

There still remains only God to protect man against man. Either we will serve him in spirit and in truth or we shall enslave ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous idol that we have made with our own hands to our own image and likeness. Etienne Gilson, 20th century

Smashing clay pots is called iconoclasm, a good thing when it's needed. The failure to do it when needed is called idolatry, always a bad thing. In both writing and faith, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again—if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure and the inadequacy of our frail, finite, and flawed words.

Avec l'argent, nul n'est à l'aise : ceux qui croient le détester l'idolâtrent en secret. Ceux qui l'idolâtrent le surestiment. Ceux qui feignent de le mépriser se mentent à eux-mêmes. Engouement

Let everyone be left free not to be happy without feeling ashamed, or to be happy episodically as one sees fit. Issue no decisions, make no laws, impose nothing. If we do not want a legitimate aspiration to degenerate into a collective punishment, we must treat the pitiless idol of happiness with the most extreme disrespect.

One sees in God only what one worships.

If awesome things in creation become your god, the God who created those things will not own your awe. Horizontal awe is meant to do one thing: stimulate vertical