Habakkuk 2:18-19
"How foolish to trust in your own creation—a god that can’t even talk! What sorrow awaits you who say to wooden idols, 'Wake up and save us!’ To speechless stone images you say, ‘Rise up and teach us!’ Can an idol tell you what to do? They may be overlaid with gold and silver, but they are lifeless inside."
When a man makes a god he makes it like himself. And even though the man fashions it with eyes, and ears, it cannot see his good works or hear his prayers. The man will create legs and arms for it, but it cannot walk with him, nor can it embrace the man. He'll carve a mouth for it, and a nose, he'll lay it over with gold and silver, but it cannot speak, and it cannot smell the man's incense offerings. Still the man worships and makes his offerings. And ultimately the man's god becomes like the man. His god thinks like the man thinks. His god loves and hates the things the man loves and hates. And it makes judgements that the man would make. He has created himself.
You see friends, all idolatry is ultimately secular humanism. It may have the semblance of religion or holiness, but it is merely the man creating a god for himself that is just an image of himself, or the self he hopes to be. It is thought that religion has framed and shaped much of human culture, but in truth it's the other way around. The human and his culture have framed and shaped the gods. The secular humanist imagines a culture that seeks to assuage its fears by making religious offerings to supernatural beings who the culture believes manages the universe. Yet they miss the simple truth, the culture didn't create a god capable of overcoming the natural challenges of life. The man created an image of himself and put on it all his concerns in order to draw from it self confidence and motivation to overcome his anxiety. He created a mirror. And he made for himself a picture of what could be. And then became people who were employed to coach the rest of the people into making the best use of that idol. These guru's instruct those who aren't as attuned to the gods. And they give motivating speeches designed to inspire the people into thinking and believing and doing things in ways that the idol would appreciate.
That idol can be just about anything. It can be a tree or stone shaped into the image of man. It can be a book. It can be a healing herb. It can be a dietary supplement plan. It can be an exercise program. It can be an investment strategy. It can be a philosophy about an unknown god. It can be a community of thought focused on human reason, logic, and secular ethics. And it can become a government policy. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Each has its priests and priestesses. And they are all equally unimportant eternally.
Each idol has the same substance, secular humanism.
How can that be Mike?
Because none of them transcends human nature. They all assume humans are capable of being ethically and morally pure in the gods they worship, the gods that reflect themselves. They may reject religious dogma and not name a deity as their god, but they build gods just the same, non-transcendent gods, man-gods. No matter its form or doctrine, it is a secular man-god because it's created by the man for the man to inspire the man to be more like the man.
Many of the ancients created these idols and built around them a religious order, this is true, but the purpose for that idol finds its origins not in the supernatural or transcendent, but in the calculus of pain and pleasure. They were hedonists. The hedonists finds the good or the true in the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. These are the same goals for the secularist. Most atheists subscribe to secularism and like most secularists they indulge in the orgy of hedonism. They leave off the deity but continue to worship the idol just the same, because the god has always only been the man himself. They seek the experience of ecstasy in their lives according to whatever self image they've created for themselves. We see this starkly today in the social media environments.
The hedonistic paradox:
What happens if the secularist fails to achieve the pleasure sought?
Despair, anger, suicide.
Or worse...what if you achieve what you want for too long? (Overindulgence)
You get bored. And you fall out.
So all the secularists are seeking some form of balance in that paradox...ultimate ataraxia. Peace of mind. A pleasure that comes when the mind is at rest. So their gods (idols) they worship both give pleasure and pain so that the balance is sustained. If they don't they are lost to a personal kind of hell. No pain no gain. No joy no calm. You cannot sustain constant suffering and endure, and you cannot sustain constant joy and endure. You must have a balance to find your calm. Not happiness, calm. Happiness is not really a thing. It's more a feeling than a reality.
Today, many try to induce ataraxia with a buzz. Drugs, alcohol, food, sex, rock and roll, work, success, political aspirations, fame, fortune...whatever, they all are attempts at finding peace of mind. We all know people like this. How many are "happy"?
They've built their idols and fashioned them into their own image. Some have several. That's the balancing act seeking ataraxia. And they all have one thing in common, they are not transcendent. Thinking themselves free of religious constraints they constrain themselves to human nature. They cannot surpass the usual limits of the human experience because their gods are made by human hands. Their range of understanding is limited to human knowledge and their god's scientific reviews of the material world. They squander transcendence on materialistic matters. Their search for transcendence ends in a mirror.