We all have a personal God; a supreme value by which we regulate everything, to which we orientate ourselves, for which if need be we sacrifice everything. And if this is not the true God, then it is some kind of idol, an old or a new one - money, career, sex, or pleasure - none of them evil things in themselves, but enslaving for those for whom they become God. Orientation to the one true God, to the sole Absolute, liberates us from all these things and permits us to use them, to express ourselves as human beings with them. Orientation toward the one true God thus makes a human being truly free in this world. But in all this we are speaking very generally. We must continue our reflections and peak more precisely; Where do I get my commitment to essential Christian values from?
Anyone who doesn't see that that is certainly true of money is in denial, whether it is in the vulgar materialism as exemplified in Trump, Putin, Xi or the billionaires they work with, who put them into power, who sustain them in power for their mutual enrichment through theft and gangsterism simply doesn't understand the Mammonist theocracy that rules economics and politics. You can contrast that in very way to The Law of Moses which was a program to prevent that kind of accumulation of wealth in what was largely an agrarian society, specifically naming the big money crops of commerce, grain, olives and grapes as something the destitute, the widow, the orphan the alien living among you were to be provided with and with access to, the provisions for cancelling debts, forbidding the most excessive forms of debt slavery and actual slavery rampant in the region at the time.
There is no accident about the contrast in Exodus when Moses is being given The Law on Sinai and the Children of Israel demanding Aaron make them an idol out of gold. The false god of gold couldn't be a greater contrast to the true God who, when Moses asked who to tell the Children of Israel sent him said to tell them "I am" to tell them "I am" sent him. I doubt that a more perfect contrast exists in literature, one that would give us a warning against the major source of theocratic evil in our world, the one Paul warned was the source of evil, the love, the adoration, the worship of money, the God behind the smokescreen of ideological confrontation, even behind the alleged religious conflicts in almost every case. I cannot believe that the Saudi leadership is clashing with the Iranian republic over whether to pray three times a day or five. As in the Crusades, the real motive behind that impending blood bath is money and the power to get money.
Hans Kung left out the most popular such god available to us no matter how much money or power we have, ourselves. He also left out the cousins of such a god, fashion, a perception that we are worshiped by others due to thinks like being up to date and admirable. He also left out other popular gods some of them related to professional or educational status. The pantheon of such false gods is vast and included the "non-god" or "no-god" that I was surprised to find I had to address starting in 2006 about a month before I started writing on politics and how the American left could regain what was squandered since 1965.
It is a good test of whether or not your "supreme value" is true or not the extent to which it frees you, truly frees you instead of, as such highly seductive false gods as self-worship, sex, money and career, it ends up enslaving you.
Fear and resentments are some of the most powerful gods working in American politics, gods encouraged by the money men as a means of controlling the masses, the gods of regional resentment, of ginned up nonsense from horse operas, the regionalist lore and superstition of the lost cause, white supremacy, etc. Hollywood is the Rome of those religious cults. The irony of that is that it deceives its suckers into putting the very ones who are really oppressing them into power. The church on screen of those religions is a powerful idol in itself. One which the pseudo-left and even much of the would-be actual left worship in the cult of "free speech - free press".
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