Are Christians, Muslims and atheists idolaters?

this should be fun.

Greatest I Am

What kind of an idolater are you?
The way that I look at it, we all, in a sense, idolize something or someone ~ not just the Christian, Muslim, et cetera.
I idolize the stars, the trees, the ocean and its waves…

If a Christian or a Muslim or any spiritual person loves his/her god, that is not necessarily being an idolater.
It may simply be about having a relationship with Something or Someone thought to be greater than one’s self and finding meaning and perhaps service within that.

What makes an idolater depends on how extreme or fanatical one is and how that influences one’s behavior.
I think that it is a question of degrees.

Let us not go throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Again, what is it that you idolize? What brings out the idolater in you? :evilfun:

Aside from all of that, the only real thing perhaps which I see as pure idolatry is kneeling in front of a !statue! ~ it does not matter what statue ~ and praying to it, as if the statue itself was the real embodiment of who is being prayed to.
That is like a superstition to me, kind of magical thinking and behavior. I do realize that sometimes these statues are just to be used to maintain one’s focus on who is really being addressed but I can greatly suggest that these idolaters are praying to cold, hard formed material, though beautiful forms, without even realizing it.

Now that, to me, is idolatry.

Indeed.

And stop lying about what they do not or cannot know.

youtube.com/watch?v=vjRy29R4gP8

vimeo.com/25149893

Regards
DL

The differences in thinking is irrelevant to the idea that we all place our thinking system above all else and are thus idolizing them.

Give a listen to this poet as he take the semantics out of the argument before he goes into preach mode.

youtube.com/watch?v=SkZg1ZflpJs

If you keep things simple, my point is easier to see.

If you do not put whatever thinking system you follow, your ideology, as your idolized ideal, then what system do you think is better and why are you not thinking that way?

Regards
DL

Theism of the supernatural kind. I agree.

Theism that put’s man above God, I think is the way to go, which is basically what was going on before Christtians and Muslims began reading their myths literally.

Have a look at how much more intelligent things were before literalism.

bigthink.com/videos/what-is-god-2-2

Regards
DL

Be it a statue or whatever mental picture a person forms of his God or ideology, it is the thinking pattern/ideology which is idolized. The various groups mentioned in the O.P. all hold fast to their ideologies and are thus idol worshipers.

“What kind of an idolater are you?”

The kind that might not be an idolater in the real sense of that word.

My ideal and ideology tells me to take what I have, raise the bar of excellence and seek anew. In that sense, Gnostic Christians cannot ever be satisfied or be idol worshipers as we are never satisfied and always looking to dethrone our God and replace him with a better one.

I guess one could see that as my idolizing my ideology, of not idolizing my ideology, as it should be seeking to evolve to something better.

Please follow that link just above to get a better picture of my thinking.

Regards
DL

:text-thankyouyellow:

As they say, a being who wants to be worshipped isn’t worthy of worship. To explain what this phrase means: don’t worship!!

Maybe God doesn’t care about being worshiped.

Well, at least we got rid of that idolatry issue and now we have moved on to a new idea: worshiping is bad. New thread?

Worship meaning

and so…

and

Sounds terrible.

Who is this ‘they’`?

Me personally, I am not a big fan or worshipping, not because respecting and loving are bad but because one is told what to feel, rather the feeling coming naturally from the relationship. That’s me.

phyllo

There just may be a lot of truth within that but would it actually matter?

Human beings probably evolved to have no choice but to worship. We realize our imperfections/frailties, smallness (for lack of a better word) and having something or someone to worship raises us above our picayune natures to where we come to be in relationship with whatever we experience as being the sublime.

Love, Lust, God, Worship probably all from the same part of the brain (?) ~ we are powerless to transcend them but do we have to soar so high and would it not be a wise thing to choose in a more harmless way?

It matters in Ecmandu’s argument/reasoning. How he can possibly know if God wants to be worshiped is beyond me.

Oh, I think there is a choice being made.

Sure. Worship satisfies some want or need in the worshiper.

Worship itself doesn’t seem particularly harmful but in the extreme, it can lead to places that one ought not to go.

All of those concepts and images, real or imaginary, are stored in our minds. That makes them a part of our ideals and ideology. All worship their ideologies and hold it as our greatest ideal in thinking.

Anything else is semantics.

bing.com/videos/search?q=co … ORM=VRDGAR

Regards
DL

You cannot help yourself, unless you have an ego problem.

Give a listen to the link in the post just above.

Regards
DL

Are you an evolving creature?

Do you seek to be one of the fittest of your species or one of the less fit?

If you are not trying to be the fittest, then you will not care about love and worship and such concepts.

Do you not love yourself? Is love not a form of worship?

Regards
DL

Can you be told what to feel? Sure.

Can you feel the way someone tells you to feel? No.

If a poster here told you to love them, for instance, you would quickly tell them where to go.

Do you love yourself?

Regards
DL

To all.

Jesus said to love yourself as well as God.

Love, worship, adore are all synonymous. We love ourselves and our ideologies, which is good, but we are allowing it to go to idolatry if we have a fixed ideology.

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

Love is a precursor to adoration and worship and are synonymous to idolatry.

The worship you give God you are also told to give yourself.

If you follow Jesus, you will love and worship yourself and that is why we are all idolaters.

If Jesus is a good man to you, then you will try to love and adore the ideology you follow.

Regards
DL

You need to explain what you mean by “fittest” because in the Darwinian sense, love and worship are not required to adapt and survive.

I would say no. It would mean that every time that you love a person or thing, then you are worshiping it. Seems like an excessive stretch on the intended meaning of “worship”. Do you worship your cat or dog?

Then you’re saying that anyone who loves, is an idolater.

Does that really make sense?