You shall have no other gods before me. Exodus 20:3
Why God Will Not Tolerate Idolatry
October 15, 2008
See how the world (whose chaste and pregnant womb
Of late conceived, and brought forth nothing ill)
Is now degenerated, and become a base adulteress
Whose false births do fill the earth with monsters,
Monsters that do roam and rage about, and make a trade to kill,
Now gluttony paunches; lust begins to spawn;
Wrath takes revenge, and avarice a pawn;
Pale envy pines, pride swells, and sloth begins to yawn.
Francis Quarles EMBLEMS
“Idolatry is man’s device to shield himself from the living God. The religious instinct in man does not allow him to shake off all reference to the authority of God; hence the resort to idolatry, which allows men to appear to themselves religious at the same time that it enables them to follow their own inclinations.
The frightful representations of God found among the heathen do not prove their ignorance of God, but their unwillingness to have to do with the living and true God.”
"Magic is that paganistic reversal of the process of religion, in which man, instead of letting himself be used by God for the divine purpose, drags down his god to the level of a tool, which he uses for his own selfish purpose.
Magic is full of superstition, and, after a fashion, full of the quasi-supernatural, but it is void of true religion. Because it lacks the element of objective divine self-communication from above, it needs to create for itself material means of compulsion that will bring the deity to do its bidding." George Bowen, missionary to Bombay (now Mumbai)