Run from Idolatry

 

Run from Idolatry

One doesn’t hear the phrase “idol worship” so much today. If you hear it at all, it is used mostly to describe something that went on long ago, thousands of years ago, before the world became enlightened with democracy and the New York Times. But as the saying goes, the Devil’s best trick is to convince you that he doesn’t exist. Idol worship is everywhere today and getting more intense with each passing moment.

Here’s how you spot it. Watch the people who make saviors out of worldly entities and throw themselves at their feet. They offer sacrifices, even their children, and will slaughter all who don’t join in on the worship. Following all that is wild acts of sin.

Some examples. I don’t recall as a kid hearing the term GOAT in discussions about sports. We would talk about all-stars and legends of the game. There were many of them, more than I could even remember. Sports talk today is mostly about determining who is the GOAT, the greatest of all-time, the one, the one god so to speak.

It’s an absurd topic. Athlete Michael Jordan is constantly called the GOAT of basketball. Here’s what he says about it. “I don’t want it in a sense because I think it disrespects Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West — you know all the guys that prior to me I never had a chance to play against. What everybody is saying I am, I never had the chance to compete against other legends that was prior to me. When I hear it, I cringe a little bit because it’s a little bit embarrassing because no one knows. I never had the chance, once again, to play against those guys. I would love to have played against them, but I never did. And for you to say that I’m better than him. I mean it’s your opinion; it’s their opinion. I accept that as their opinion. If you ask me, I would never say that I am the greatest player, and that’s because I never played against all the people that represented the league prior to Michael Jordan.”

Sounds reasonable. You can see a bit of why this guy was such a great athlete. (Baseball player Ted Williams talked the same way.) He had the right attitude about his athletics. But that doesn’t stop the sports writers whose favorite topic is GOAT talk. They do it in every sport. It dominates sports discussion.

And it’s really weird. Sports writers and pundits can be intelligent, but they are not the most urbane of people. There’s a lot of macho, a lot of bluster, a lot of tough talk. They admire athletes and athletes are physical. They compete against one another. They try to win. It’s not Church. Every athlete on some level is a ruffian, even tennis players. And the sports writers imitate them.

It’s alarming to see these tough talking sports pundits throw themselves at the feet of the GOATs. They sound like teenage girls screaming for the Beatles. You half expect them to wet their pants as did the girls during Beatlemania. Some of them are former athletes, their muscles still bulging through their jackets. Yet, they get all giggly when talking about the GOATs. Actually, they alternate. They giggle and then they roar. Back and forth it goes. It’s very confusing. To a large extent, the GOATee achieves dominance through the GOAT. It’s a vicarious conquest. You see this with doctors and Harvard graduates. The guy knows that he is not modern medicine itself. He is not Harvard. But by his association, he becomes a kind of king.

In my view, GOAT talk is bad for sports. It’s a winner-take-all enterprise. You wind up feeling as if this one guy or gal is the only one to have ever played the game. Everybody else fades away, even people who are just about as good. This is what talk about God is supposed to be like. There’s only one God. He’s perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful. Nothing is even comparable. But that only happens with God, not with anything in the physical world. GOAT-talk imitates religious-talk like sportswriters imitate athletes.

GOATees talk about their GOAT as if he were all-powerful and all-knowing. Flaws are hidden. Michael Jordan missed more than half of his shots. We don’t talk about that. We replay his best moments over and over, even though those comprise much less than a percentage point of his years of playing.

GOAT talk also involves downplaying the achievements of all the other players, even really good ones. Take Wilt Chamberlain for example. Wilt actually has better statistics than Michael. They both averaged 30.1 points a game in their careers, but Wilt also had 22 rebounds a game to Michael’s 6.2. He was an incredible force on the court, but mostly what you hear about him is that he didn’t win, so Michael is better.

But Wilt did win. He won two championships and with two different teams, which is a special accomplishment. He reached the finals four other times. Those also are highly successful seasons, except for the last game or two. The man won plenty.

Michael understands all this, which is why he doesn’t like being called the greatest of all-time. But the sports analysts mostly don’t understand it, which is interesting since they spend their days and nights analyzing sports. And if you hear them rattle off sports statistics and complicated arguments full of arcane sports facts, you realize they are not dummies. But on this topic, they become dummies.

Seems to me that what the sports writers are engaging in is idol worship. The world was created to honor the glory of God. People are supposed to do this consciously. When they don’t, they worship idols. To worship an idol, you have to warp your brain. You have to lie about reality. To make a god of anything worldly, you have to live in fantasy;you have to lie about reality.

For years, the tennis world saw the Swiss Roger Federer as the GOAT. Then the Spaniard Rafael Nadal started to beat him. Roger is older, but we won’t talk about that even though it’s a sport based largely on stamina. When we are declaring a GOAT, we forget facts. Then the Serbian Novak Djokovic started to beat Nadal. He’s younger than Nadal, but we forget that. For about a year now, ever since Djokovic caught up to the other two in grand-slam wins, Djokovic has been the GOAT in the eyes of what seems like most pundits and fans. I saw a slew of articles just a week ago referencing Djokovic with the adjective GOAT.

Recently, a strange thing happened. It’s called COVID. You may have heard of it. We’ll get to all the idolatry around that in a bit. Djokovic has refused to say whether or not he has received the COVID shot which some call a vaccine. So the country of Australia, host to one of the four tennis grand-slams, a former democracy turned tyranny, refused to let him play. Officials there shoved him into a low-class quarantine hotel, surroundings he surely isn’t used to anymore, and generally disrespected him. With Federer being injured, Nadal won the tournament.

Guess who is the new GOAT? The articles are everywhere. I glanced at a number of them. Not one mentions that Djokovic wasn’t allowed to play! How can you declare Nadal better when they didn’t play one another or even play in the same tournament?

Like idolatry, GOAT-talk is disloyal. You go from this god to that god as the human race has done for 6,000  years. We don’t talk about Jupiter anymore except when discussing astronomy. We have new gods. The old ones are dumped like boyfriends or girlfriends.

There are GOATs in every area of life. The Beatles are the rock music GOAT. I could go on for far too long about how overrated they were, how, for all their good music, their lyrics were quite often banal and their facility with musical instruments even worse. They also were not the world’s greatest human beings, with 3 of the 4 being adulterers, all being disloyal to old friends, and all living like kings while pretending to be humanitarians. No matter, the Beatles won this spot as music GOAT, and you simply can’t have an intelligent conversation with Beatle worshippers.

Speaking of people with whom you cannot have an intelligent conversation about their god, there’s Zionists. God is infallible, right? That’s how Zionists see the state of Israel. It never does anything wrong. If you show mounds of evidence of Zionist military and police brutality, even cold-blooded murder, the Zionists will deny it all. Can’t be. God is perfect.

You cannot have an intelligent discussion with idol worshippers. With Zionists something else happens. They won’t let you talk intelligently about Zionism. Zionists brought censorship to the world. Nobody on the planet is allowed to criticize the state of Israel. Nobody on the planet is allowed to ask questions about the Holocaust either. The connection is that Zionists have acquired the rights to the Holocaust. They own it now and are very strict about who uses their material.

Just try to compare COVID tyranny and mandated vaccination to the Holocaust. Evidentially, that makes you an antisemite. Don’t even try to make sense of that because it’s senseless. What’s the point of Holocaust education if you are not allowed to spot another Holocaust? It is fair to say that the point of Zionist sponsored Holocaust education is to justify the formation of the state of Israel and its continuation as a very messed up place. If anybody else uses the material, it undermines the real goal. And the real goal is not merely to have a so-called Jewish state (which it’s called even though it is atheistic and antagonistic to religious Jews) but to have an idol.

Idolatry isn’t just about the sensation of worshipping false gods, it’s about the excitement generated by exaggerated fears. COVID-19 is an exaggerated fear. In the state of Israel, 8,000 have died of COVID in two years, or so we are told. Really, the great majority of them died with COVID, as they were deathly ill with other conditions like in every other country. Really, the average age of death is 80. Thus, the 8,000 number is not as it seems. But let’s go with that number. Did you know that every year 8,000 people die in Israel from cigarette smoking with 800 dying from second-hand smoke? Yet over the last two years, I have not seen a single article in the Israeli press about deaths from smoking. I have not heard a single utterance from the government about the hazards of smoking. The government has shut down the country, shut down life in 100 different ways over COVID. Yet, smoking isn’t even a discussion point. As I said, idolatry requires denial of reality. You deny facts. You make up facts, which of course aren’t really facts. They are fantasies. Living in terror is denial of reality.

Death is scary and someday all of us will be dead. So, there are things to fear in this life. That’s where God comes in to help us. The book of Psalms is all about enemies, dangers, and fears. But all that is couched in faith that God will help us. Idolaters don’t have God, so they are full of fear. And they create idols to save them from the fears.

That brings us to the topic of vaccines. I haven’t in all my life witnessed hysteria as mad as that surrounding vaccines. People talk as if vaccines will have us living forever. They are the panacea. They are gods.

Sorry folks, there really are good fact-supported arguments that vaccines, like the Beatles, are overrated. The incidence of small-pox, measles, and many other targets of vaccines, really did plummet before vaccines were introduced. Good plumbing works wonders. Visit an out-house some time and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m not getting into the topic of whether vaccines can help sometimes. I’d much rather discuss this notion that pharmaceutical companies are infallible. These are profit seeking entities, some of which, like Pfizer, the most famous of them, have been caught lying, stealing, and killing. Would you trust me with your life? Would you trust any stranger? So why do you trust them? Did you know that the US government has exempted vaccine makers from tort law? You cannot sue them. Such conditions have been placed on COVID distribution by all other countries. It’s crazy. Such trust. It’s a denial of reality that’s so extreme that it reminds one of idol worshippers.

And idol worship it is. There are others: feminism is another. That’s rampant today. People have turned women into gods. I have no doubt that they are channeling some kind of idolatrous force of the goddess when they say the ridiculous things they say about women. I saw a list recently of somebody’s greatest conductors of all time. All kinds of women I never heard of filled the top ten. Toscanini was 35^th or so. Leonard Bernstein did even worse. Tina Fey topped the list of comedians of the last twenty years. She’s very funny, but she’s not Chris Rock or Lewis C.K. You can’t even make the case. But idolatry doesn’t care about making a case. It rants and roars instead.

Some say that idolatry lowers people because the people imitate the gods. I agree. But I believe something else happens as well. The gods are created in our image. They are products of our lust, our greed, and our arrogance. Wherever you see idolatry you see bad people, you see arrogance and heartlessness.

How many feminists have the police remove their husbands from their homes? How many Zionists not only turn away from Israeli military murderousness but cheer it on? Of all the Zionists who pushed me to move to Israel, how many have lent me any help or had me over their house even once? There’s only one, but that’s largely because she was a friend of my wife and she’ also not really a Zionist. Her husband is. Want to know who has had me over? Anti-zionists, Neturei Karta even. I get invitations from them all the time. You know, the so-called soneh Yisroel. They are the ones who have been kind to this Jew.

The COVID worshippers tend to be cruel too. One hears not just loud-mouths like Howard Stern but polls talking about denying health care to people who deem the COVID shot unsafe. “Let them die.” This week rock music “legends” Neil Young and Joni Mitchell gave the Spotify website an ultimatum to either censor the Joe Rogan show or remove their music. Why is this? Because Joe’s show was spreading misinformation about COVID. That’s the claim. Joe, who tests each person who walks in the studio for COVID, has interviewed very knowledgeable scientists who don’t buy into the government’s COVID narrative. We can’t have that. We can’t hear two sides of the argument. Anything that doesn’t match the government story is deemed misinformation. Neil and Joni are supposed to be hippies. If I recall correctly, in the 1960s, we questioned authority, in particular that of the government and big corporations.

Either Neil and Joni have changed, or they were never hippies. Most hippies weren’t ideological hippies. They were just people who enjoyed sin. I had a coworker who told me that in the 1960s he went to protests only to meet women. The government at that time was basically conservative so they opposed the government. They didn’t question authority. They opposed morality. It really shouldn’t be shocking to see Neil and Joni promoting censorship and cozying up to greedy corporations and tyrannical governments. They never had ideals. They liked making music.

Idolatry is an act of arrogance at its core. It takes arrogance to deny truth, to demonize others, to sacrifice children. It’s a waste of time to talk to idolaters because you are dealing with arrogance. And you’ll never eradicate someone else’s arrogance. Try eradicating your own.

The only salvation is in the Torah. Not that we can’t make an idol out of that. There are godol worshippers, Gemara lomdus worshippers, Zohar worshippers, rebbe worshippers. Idolatry is everywhere. The proper approach I believe was expressed by Shlomo HaMelech: Fear God and keep His commandments. Don’t fear COVID, don’t fear the Israeli government. They are dangerous for sure. But most of the day you should focus on God. You do that with Jewish life. Focus on that. Engage in the full range of commandments, all of them, not on one or two. Engage in the full range of Torah, or at least a fuller range than you likely do now. Chumash, Tehillim, Halacha, Mishnah, Gemara, Musar, Chassidus, even if just a tiny bit of each, or most of them.

Shlomo also said there’s nothing new under the sun. There was idolatry then. There’s idolatry now, both in the gentile world and the Jewish world. Watch out for it. Run from idolaters. Run from the idolatry in yourself.