One must love God first, and only then can one love one's closest of kin and neighbors. We must not be idols to one another, for such is not the will of God.
Thaddeus of VitovnicaStichwörter: love family christianity god spirituality idolatry neighbors eastern-orthodoxy will-of-god
A careful reading of the Old and New Testaments shows that idolatry is nothing like the crude picture that springs to mind of a sculpture in some distant country. The idea is highly sophisticated, drawing together the complexities of motivation in individual psychology, the social environment, and also the unseen world. Idols are not just on pagan altars, but in well-educated human hearts and minds
Richard KeyesStichwörter: idolatry old-testament richard-keyes
Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.
Charlotte BrontëStichwörter: injustice women society death marriage hatred hypocrisy decay force family-relationships expectations unhappiness idolatry discord vice matrimony disparity preconceptions demons scorn social-norms married-life false-belief families lovelessness disgust contempt captivity domestic-life worldliness disharmony unfreedom
Technology presents us with a unique spiritual challenge. Because it is meant to serve us in fulfilling our created purpose, because it makes our lives easier, longer, and more comfortable, we are prone to assign to it something of a godlike status. We easily rely on technology to give our lives meaning, and we trust technology to provide an ultimate answer to the frustration of life in a fallen world. Because of this, technology is uniquely susceptible to becoming an idol, raising itself to the place of God in our lives.
Tim ChalliesStichwörter: technology idolatry
The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
Jonathan SwiftBy giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships?
Tim ChalliesStichwörter: community idolatry discipleship
These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen
give themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human vanity sees
no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.
Stichwörter: compassion god idolatry
I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.
Augustine of HippoStichwörter: disillusionment idolatry anxiety
I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.
Augustine of HippoStichwörter: sin idolatry wickedness
This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!
Charles DickensStichwörter: poverty materialism idolatry
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