Quotes About Idolatry

We offer up prayers to God only because we have made Him after our own image. We treat Him like a Pasha or a Sultan who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

'Tis mad idolatryTo make the service greater than the god.

Do not swear at all;Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,Which is the god of my idolatry.

Fetishism and idolatry are the gateway to polytheism. Certain spirits are elevated in esteem and power so that they are now considered gods. Rituals develop; superstitions give way to prayers and sacrifices; relationships among the deities are recognized and get complicated. Nevertheless, polytheism is still just animism on a bigger scale.

Idleness and idolatry aren't related but they ought to be.

Because the rituals of the larger culture play a formative role in fashioning our affections, it must be recognized that idolatry is not merely an individual sin but is embedded in the very patterns of civilizations where they take on a systemic character.

And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.

God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness and consolation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had, under the watchful gaze of this child, vanished forever into the smoke of the human holocaust demanded by the Race, the most voracious of all idols. And

If we love someone more than we love God, it is worse than inordinate - it is idolatry. When God is first in our hearts, all other loves are in order and find their rightful place.

Constantly the Bible deals decisively with the inner spirit of slavery that an idolatrous attachment to wealth brings. "If riches increase, set not your heart on them," counsels the psalmist (Ps. 62:10). The tenth commandment is against covetousness, the inner lust to have, which leads to stealing and oppression. The wise sage understood that "He who trusts in his riches will wither" (Prov. 11:28).

many things tempt our hearts to put them first and God second. We must root out the desire to worship these things and focus on the true God. The

There is an inborn urge in each person to worship. If we don't worship God we will find something else to worship, whether it be a job, a family, money, a sport, or even ourselves.

To the Idolator, events really are what they appear to be as coded into his or her favorite reality-tunnel. Any other reality-tunnel, however useful it may appear to others with different purposes and different interests, must then be mad or bad — delusory or fraudulent. Anybody who disagrees with such an Idolator must be, by definition, a loony or a liar.

I am merely suggesting, playfully at times, maybe seriously at other times, that Universe is a bit more complicated than anybody's models; and that using several reality-tunnels — as in Po or quantum mechanics — may show a great many interesting correlations and details and exciting and beautiful aspects that we will never see if we look always and only through one monotonous reality-tunnel which we have made into an Idol.

Leaving aside these experiences or hallucinations of creativity and growth or self-criticism and self-overcoming — we shall return to them — it appears that most of what I have been calling Idolatry and Fundamentalism can be biologically described as normal primate behavior — mechanical imprinting and conditioning combined with normal territorial pugnacity.

Medieval Idolatry consisted of metaphors that were called Revealed Truth. Modern Idolatry consists of metaphors that are called Objective Truth. In both cases human linguistic structures — complicated primate chatterings — have, in effect, become Gods, and whoever questions them is considered a blasphemer and the priests seek to destroy the impiety. That's how books get burned, in Florence in 1300 (or in New York in 1956, as we shall see).

This One True Philosophy is the modern form of the One True Church of the dark ages. The fundamentalist materialist is the modern Idolator; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it.

It seems that when any model becomes an Idol its advocates begin to act like priests and inquisitors.

It should die down in a few days." "And if it doesn't?" Truly shrugged. "Enjoy the idolatry. You earned it, my friend. You really came through for us." A tall thin guy from one of the national networks yelled, "Hey, Sherlock Holmes! Are you really that good or did you just get lucky?" I said, "Some idol." Truly laughed and I climbed into my car and drove away. Slowly. I almost ran over a cameraman.

Unable to resist, she said, "Mortals also go there to worship a mouse god. His likeness is everywhere. There's a duck demigod too.

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

For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

If religion might be judged of according to men's intentions, there would scarcely be any idolatry in the world.

That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.