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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Yes, if you look at the melding the terms do in the dictionary definitions.
If you are stuck in semantics then you will not get what I am saying anyway.
If the one you love is not the ideal to you and you cannot idolize her the way I idolize my wife, as well as love, honor, worship etc., then that is too bad.
Semantics : “the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc”
Your entire argument is about the meaning of words, specifically the peculiar meanings that you are assigning to common words. How can this not be about semantics?
I can’t possibly get anything from an internet forum which is not based on the meaning of words.
A real person or thing can’t be ideal because it is always flawed in some way.
