#idolatry

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. ↗

— Esther Dyson

#idolatry #internet #technology #internet

Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#idolatry #worship #love

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#idolatry #idols #love-disappointment #love

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#fundamentalism #god #humor #idolatry #spirituality

mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire. ↗

— George Eliot

#idolatry #money #love

Idolatry is really not good for anyone. Not even the idols. ↗

— John Bach

#even #good #idolatry #idols #really

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. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#culture #destroy #essential #forms #idolatry

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#art #idolatry #individuality #legacy #love

‎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 Keyes

#old-testament #richard-keyes #education

By 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 Challies

#discipleship #idolatry #change