A Thought on Idolatry

When a finite value...[becomes] a center of value by which other values are judged...[and] has been elevated to centrality and imagined as a final source of meaning, then one has chosen what Jews and Christians call a god....To be worshipped as a god, something must be sufficiently good to be plausibly regarded as the rightful center of one's valuing...One has a god when a finite value is worshipped and adored and viewed as that without which one cannot receive life joyfully (Thomas Oden, Two Worlds, 95).