“We make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship.”

“Man Made 'God' in his own image. The eternal, the infinate, the unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as 'my god' or 'our god'.”

“One must love God first, and only then can one love one's closest of kin and neighbors. We must not be idols to one another, for such is not the will of God.”

“If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.”

“As God was expunged from American life, idols came in to fill the void; idols of sensuality, idols of greed, of money, of success, comfort, materialism, pleasure, sexual immorality, self-worship, self-obsession. The sacred increasingly disappeared, and the profane took its place.”

“Religion has no power if God is not truly 'dangerous,' but religion also seeks to manage God, and make God safe.The second commandment speaks against the management of God. We cannot help but make our images of God, for God has given us imagination. But every image we make of God is finally a box: a cage, potentially an idol, from which the living God keeps breaking out. And if we try to keep God there, then God comes out with 'jealousy' to overturn our careful construction.The third commandment speaks against the management of God. To take God's name in vain is to make God useful to our projects and ourselves. We are wont to trivialize the truth of God and then disparage it for being trivial. We are told God's name in order to love this God, but loving God is not managing God but fearing [respecting] God. And with God, the attitudes of love and fear [respect] are not contradictory but complementary.”