We have an idol of Avolokiteshvara, hand made in Nepal of bronze, sitting on our mantle. I have taught my daughter to pray near the idol, reciting the prayer of Psalm 115:4-8:
But their idols are silver and gold,
made by the hands of men.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but they cannot see;
they have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but they cannot smell;
they have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but they cannot walk;
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them
Then, I normally pull out some money and show her the faces engraved on the side, and we recite the same prayer to those little idols.
I’m pretty much in the idol-making business. For much of my life, I’ve helped people create models and simulations to persuade and help make decisions. From simple CAD designs to linear regressions and monte carlo simulations, to large-scale clustering and basketing algorithms. For the past few years, my medium has been narrative. Evolutionary biology is a treasure trove of idolatry techniques, and I find that its methods can be very persuasive to people. Just today, I deftly employed some sophisticated evolutionary arguments to argue for a specific design decision, with good effect. I felt the pride of craftsmanship, as people praised my narrative for its beauty and agreed with my conclusions.
I tell myself that it’s OK, because I know that they are “just models”, and if anyone else fails to realize that these are just models, it’s their own damned fault. I’m very honest about the fact that I build soulless models, and it’s not my fault if others aren’t careful enough about idolatry. In fact, I’m happy to discuss idolatry with anyone who wants to listen.
But I sometimes wonder if I’m violating one of the most important rules of being a Christian.
When St. Paul and St. Peter differed on which parts of the law applied to Christians, they both agreed that it was very important to never, ever eat food that had been sacrificed to idols. Modern Christians often ignore this law, since “we don’t have idol worship in our culture, and we certainly don’t offer them food!”
This seems like a big fat cop-out to me. We do have idols. I build them. And people do make offerings to those idols. We need to understand why St. Paul and St. Peter were so adamant about this point. I believe that the answer lies in the story of Abraham documented in Genesis. King Kederlaomer and his allies had defeated the king of Sodom and taken all of that king’s possessions. Abram defeated Kederlaomer and his allies, and restored the king of Sodom’s wealth. The king of Sodom, overwhelmed with gratitude, offered to give all of his material wealth to Abram. By the law of power, these would have been Abram’s right, but Abram declined to accept any gift from Sodom’s king, saying (Gen 14:22-24):
But Abram said to the king of Sodom, "I have raised my hand to the LORD, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and have taken an oath hat I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the thong of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, ‘I made Abram rich.’ I will accept nothing but what my men have eaten and the share that belongs to the men who went with me—to Aner, Eshcol and Mamre. Let them have their share."
This scene reminds us of the time that Satan tempted Christ, and many other examples in scripture. Can any power outside of Christ claim to us, “I made you rich”? Can any power outside of Christ claim to us, “I filled your belly?”
For the past decade or two, the world economy has been propped up by a speculative bubble based on pure fraud and idolatry. As this recent article explains, it was a model that blew up the world. It made all of us rich and fat. And some of us knew that it was pure idolatry, starting with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. When I read his books, and knew that he was right, I blogged about it. I confirmed from other idol-makers that our economy was based on worthless idols with feet of clay, and I blogged about that, too. I even warned some people before the idol with clay feet collapsed. But often asked myself if I was living off of idol food, by virtue of being part of the American economy.
Am I? I don’t know, but I think I need to consider the possibility seriously.
Maybe I don’t understand the definitition of idoltry, but it doesn’t seem to me like you are guilty of it. I thought idoltry was the worship of false ideas as God. Unless you are making the models explicitly to be worshipped, then that would be idoltry. A model of a mundane process, theory, or idea doesn’t seem to count to me. Would someone who made wooden toy trains be accused of idoltry? No, because its a model of a train, not a model of God.
Am I missing something here? How would any christian eat or pay rent in this day and age? Abram refused to take all the king’s riches, but he didn’t refuse a fair share for soldiers. Are they damned if they accept their share?
Thanks, Adam. I think you are right.
One could take a very strong stance and say that idols are anything that we rely on as a stand-in for the underlying reality, and thus impair ourselves from seeing God in his full clarity. And the Romans and Greeks of antiquity often created and worshipped idols which didn’t represent the supreme God, but instead were stand-ins for certain concepts, such as “reason” or “love”. In fact, during the time that the apostle John wrote that “God is Love”, the Babylonians believed that “Love is god”, and worshipped her in the form of Ishtar. Personally, I think it’s best to be overly sensitive about idolatry, rather than complacent.
I think of “worship” as meaning, “believe that your sustenance and survival comes from the thing, and thus seek to preserve and elevate it”. In that sense, the models I make are not intended to be worshipped, so I think you are right.
However, there are certainly large groups of people who believed that society’s survival was born of “financial innovation”, or “capitalism”, or similar. And the restriction on eating idol food was not about making sure that Christians kept away from idolatry, but to make sure that they didn’t perpetuate and encourage idolatry in others by tying their nourishment to the idolatry of others.
As an example, if I accepted a contract from the author of http://originofwealth.com, or took a portion of my paycheck from helping investment funds implement and sell models based on this sort of faith in the “goodness of the markets”, I think that would constitute “eating food that had been sacrificed to idols”, because I would be receiving money that had been given by duped idolators out of an unreasonable and idolatrous faith in the markets. I don’t think I’ve done anything like that, but I haven’t been all too cautious, either.