In America we see a wide variety of different materialistic
and idols being worshiped on the daily basis. There’s a difference between
being a fan or in love with sometime compared to idolizing and basing your entire
world based off of one thing. We tend to see this a lot in our society little
do we know. Worship explained means the feeling or expression of reverence and
adoration for a deity. In religion there are several different religious
backgrounds each having their own beliefs and gods. There isn’t one religion
that’s held over another because we all come from different background. There’s
a problem with this because we have the people who worship their religions, and
then there’s the people who worship money, fame, social media, cars, sports,
and national security. “Here are North America’s
seven most popular gods. By “god” I mean something (anything) in our life that
commands more loyalty, dedication and devotion than the one true Living God.
Not necessarily the highest loyalty, since many of us are functional
polytheists, whatever we claim. But sincere and central devotion” (churchplants).
Going back to the s=discussion that we had in class a week or so ago, we discussed
how people worship Football mire than they do God, and how important the game
is to their everyday lives. There people out that that wake up in the morning,
eat, and sleep football. Without football they would lose themselves as crazy
as that sounds. These worshipers aren’t just non-believers, there are many different
religious people that worship other idols instead of God as well. It’s
sometimes easy to point the finger at someone else when we see them doing these
nonreligious behaviors, but when we do them, we seem to forget that we are doing
the same exact sin.
https://churchplants.com/articles/6455-the-top-7-gods-americans-worship.html
Good observations and an interesting link! I'd like to encourage us to think a bit more broadly, too, about this. When we call something "sin" or "idolatry," we're using religious language. Specifically, we're taking a Christian point of view on society and social practices. There's nothing wrong with this at all. But we should ALSO (in this course) try to see what's going on there from a different angle. Why do Christians judge such devotion to be idolatrous? Because they make judgments about what is proper to spend time, money, and energy on. Because they decide for members of their community that a certain set of priorities is best if you want to achieve the ultimate goal: union with God in heaven. But what happens when we look at things from an outsider perspective? We see that in a world in which people have more and more religious CHOICE, people are often drawn away from Church toward football, music, comics, science, or other aspects of knowledge and culture. BUT, we also see that they tend to BEHAVE "religiously" with respect to those things.
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