"Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder, we are not going to be judged."
[Czeslaw Milosz]
"As we have been saying all month the natural tendency of the human heart is to take good things into ultimate things, and in ancient cultures and nonwestern traditional cultures of today the family thing is the ultimate thing. it is what we have been calling, essentially, an idol. and therefore, women who don't have children because they aren't married or can't have children because of some physical impediment felt worthless and were regarded as worthless. so if you want to further the example of that you can go into the book of Genesis where Rachel the wife of Jacob is seeking to have children and can't have children and she says, 'Give me children, or I will die!' And that about sums it up in those cultures. Now some of you saying, I know about this: those ancient cultures really oppressed women. And you're right, but I'm glad you brought that up actually... Why do you think that in those cultures women were not troubled with eating disorders at all? The point is that all cultures are fallen. And that all cultures oppress because here is what they do: every single culture put in front of men and women certain objects and says, 'You don't have them you don't have worth! You don't have them, you don't have significance! If you don't have them, your existence isn't justified! You must have them!' Ancient and traditional cultures have collective idols: you have to have a family.
Modern western culture has individualistic idols. Modern cultures say that your worth is completely dependent upon your individual assets: looks, career, money. If you don't have that, you're nothing. When Rachel says, 'Give me children, or I die!' she is saying childlessness means psychological and social death. It's very telling. If you build your identity on anything more than God, and you fail to get it, it's psychological and social death. And every culture that ever existed and and exists today is telling you to build your identity on something. Therefore, every culture is going to oppress you and crush you into the ground because every culture is cooperating with a part of our heart that wants to be its on Savior and Lord and to justify itself. And it's almost impossible when everybody else is going after these objects to not go along with them and to not be just as enslaved and crushed as everyone else in the culture. I say almost impossible because God says there's a way out. There's a way to emotional and inner freedom and cultural freedom.... He says, Your maker is your husband. Your maker is your husband. Your maker is your husband."
- Tim Keller
"The Bible does clearly teach the right of property, but both the Old Testament and the New Testament put a tremendous stress on the compassionate use of that property. If at each place where the employer was a Bible-believing Christian the world could see that less profit was being taken so that the workers would have appreciably more than the 'going rate' of pay, the gospel would have been better proclaimed throughout the whole world than if the profits were the same as the world took and then large endowments were given to Christian schools, missions, and other projects. This is not to minimize the centrality of preaching the gospel to the whole world, nor to minimize missions; it is to say that the other is also a way to proclaim the good news."
[Francis Schaeffer]
