Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially 'deify.' We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.

Money isn't an idol. It just shows you where your idols are.

Tolerance is not the absence of belief. Tolerance is how your beliefs teach you to treat other people

Jesus was much more interested in the quality of the people's response to him than in the quantity of the crowd.

In short, the enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any 'broader good' such as reflecting God's nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.

If you have to run away from something that used to be an idol, you're actually still enslaved by it. It's still controlling you.

The human heart is an idol factory that takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.