Why This Modern Idolatry?

Saturn eating his children.

It strikes me that much of the temptation to idolatry is from a desire to avoid moral obligations.

If you worship “nature,” you are implicitly reserving to yourself the right to do whatever is “natural,” that is, to follow your desires without moral scruple.

If you worship “peace,” you are denying your moral obligation to combat evil. And denying the right of anyone else to resist your own chosen evil.

If you worship “democracy,” you are claiming exemption from moral choice. Going along with the crowd is easier. It protects you from having to do anything that might cost you social position. Or cost you much of anything. You needn’t be any better than the next guy; and it is now in everyone’s interest to be no more moral than is strictly necessary. Raise the bar, and you are a bad person.

If you worship “science,” you are implicitly avoiding questions of value, in the name of scientific “objectivity.” Which is to say, you are avoiding morality. Moral concerns are incompatible with science.

Worshipping “diversity,” too, may be a matter of avoiding tough moral choices—it is implicitly an assertion of cultural relativism. If your neighbor claims his culture allows him to beat his child to death, you now have no moral obligation to intervene. You are yourself exempt from moral judgement so long as you are doing things others in your culture commonly do. Implicitly, further, so long as you are doing anything conceivably permissible in any other culture, you are not really doing anything morally wrong. At best, morality is merely social convention. Like washing your hands before you eat your firstborn.

Kind of all fits in, doesn’t it? Kind of looks like a common thread.

The same motive seems to me to be behind the great god “atheism.” “Atheists” do not, so far as I have ever seen, actually deny the existence of God. That may be impossible in rational terms. They just call it “science” or “nature.” Science and nature as they describe them, as idols, have all the attributes of God except personhood and morality.

An impersonal God will not care about morality.