idolatry

I don't see money as evil or good: how can illusion be evil or good? But I don't see heroin or meth as evil or good, either. Which is more addictive & debilitating, money or meth? Attachment to illusion makes you illusion, makes you not real. Attachment to illusion is called idolatry, called addiction.

The Bible does not say money is the root of all evil; it says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. A poor man who, in his heart, worships the idea of being rich is more vulnerable to its evils than a rich man who has a heart to use it all for the Lord.

Jealousy from a love affair is something even God can admit.

Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been holding on to more dearly than Him.

The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn't responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

Nixon was by nature a excluder. Halderman like to exclude people. When Nixon's need met Halderman's abilities, you had the most perfect formula for disaster. _ Jim Shepley

If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own __od_. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a __od_ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be __od_ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.

I cursed myself. For once, heaven had sent me "Beauty" in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down... How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?

Rather than continuing on the normal sexual path toward pain, emptiness, and idolatry, you can allow God to heal you, change the way you think, and place deliberate safeguards in your life to protect you.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

The engine that drives all your activities is hope. What you hope in shapes you.

We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.

One man's faith is considered idolatry by another

... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).

The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.