Modern Idol Worship

Three idols of the modern world:

1. The collectivist state (worship of strongest-monkey tyranny).

2. Environmentalism (worship of nature, or the planet).

3. The notion of the Noble Savage (glorification of the criminal, glorification of violent cultures, glorification of resentment and ignorance, glorification of Third World conditions.)

Each is a religion that its adherents make sacrifices to. Sacrifices such as their freedom, their prosperity, their safety. In these acts of sacrifice it is felt that the inherent sense of guilt in the adherents is expiated. Or this is the game that is played. Though it is a game that is often played to the point of real death, such is the revulsion in fallen human beings for their Creator and the pure religion revealed by their Creator in the Old and New Testaments. I.e.: "We will worship anything other than the Creator even to the point of death."

Modern Christian leaders usually list temptations in place of true idols. Temptations such as money, sex, power, fame. These are temptations not true religious idols. Temptations don't give a semblance of expiation for our inherent sense of guilt. (Neither does worshiping professional athletes or rock stars or celebrities. Run-of-the-mill shallow behavior is not deep idol-religion. There's no true sacrifice; there's no sense of expiation of guilt. It may be a training wheels version of real, deep idol worship, or it may be a cover for the real thing though.) This wrong notion of what a real idol is is difficult to remove from the consciousness of modern Christian leaders, because most of them are fully under the spell of the three real idol-religions mentioned above.