#idolatry

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

— Pope John Paul II

#error #false #idolatry #purify #science

Idolatry is in a man's own thought, not in the opinion of another. ↗

— John Selden

#idolatry #man #opinion #own #thought

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

Idolatry' is the practice of seeking the source and provision of what we need either physically or emotionally in someone or something other than the one true God. It is the tragically pathetic attempt to squeeze life out of lifeless forms that cannot help us meet our real needs. ↗

— Scott J. Hafemann

#faith

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. ↗

— Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

#eastern-orthodoxy #family #god #idolatry #love

There is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#called #concerned #danger #divine #expression

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again. ↗

— Lionel Blue

#cracked #early #i #idolatry #open

Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain. ↗

— John Calvin

#brain #certain #forge #forsake #god