I am the Lord thy God: thou shall not have strange Gods before me, Part Three

Tonight, we will wrap up our discussion on the 1^st Commandment,

I am the Lord your God: you shall not have strange Gods before me.

As we stated a few posts ago, our discussion of this Commandment will cover three posts:

Part 1 I am the Lord your God (from an individual perspective)

Part 2 I am the Lord your God (from a social perspective)

Part 3 you shall not have strange Gods before me

Tonight is Part 3, in which we will discuss other “gods” that can come between us and our worship of the one true God.

The Catechism notes that there are two extremes that violate this portion of the Commandment, superstition on one extreme as a “perverse excess of religion” (#2110) and irreligion as the other extreme, which is believing in God, but giving him no power or honor.

There are different expressions under each extreme.   Under superstition, there is idolatry.   Idolatry can take various forms.  One is polytheism, which is belief and/or worship of multiple divinities.   Another is “divinizing” something that should not be: for example, making things like power, pleasure, race, the government, money, or ancestors “divine” by the way we seem to “worship” them.

Divination (distinct from “divinizing”) is the practice of seeking to know the future or the unknown by supernatural means.   The Catechism (#2116) is pretty clear all forms of divination are to be rejected: All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.  No, we are to put our trust in God, in His providential plan for our lives.

Sorcery is another form of superstition that is to be rejected.   The Catechism (#2117) explains:  All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.   

I think we need to think twice about our love for Harry Potter!  

In superstition, we falsely seek to spread the divine to places it should not be. Not let us look at the expressions of the other extreme, irreligion, in which we mock and minimize the divine.

The first is tempting God, which is putting God‘s goodness and power to the test, like Satan did to Our Lord in the desert.   The second is sacrilege, which is profaning or treating unworthily persons consecrated to God, sacred things and actions, like the sacred liturgy.The third is simony, which is the buying and selling of spiritual things.

Irreligion means to believe in God, but not acknowledge his power and majesty.  Atheism, on the other hand, is an unbelief, a rejection of religion.  Atheists deny or reject totally the existence of God.  The Catechism (#2124) describes atheism as follows: The name "atheism" covers many very different phenomena. One common form is the practical materialism which restricts its needs and aspirations to space and time. Atheistic humanism falsely considers man to be "an end to himself, and the sole maker, with supreme control, of his own history." Another form of contemporary atheism looks for the liberation of man through economic and social liberation. "It holds that religion, of its very nature, thwarts such emancipation by raising man's hopes in a future life, thus both deceiving him and discouraging him from working for a better form of life on earth."   Atheism is wrong: belief in God does not suppress human dignity.   Human dignity is grounded and perfected in his relationship with God as Creator and Father.

Agnosticism is another form of irreverence towards God.  The Catechism (#2127 and #2128) describes as follows: Agnosticism assumes a number of forms. In certain cases the agnostic refrains from denying God; instead he postulates the existence of a transcendent being which is incapable of revealing itself, and about which nothing can be said. In other cases, the agnostic makes no judgment about God's existence, declaring it impossible to prove, or even to affirm or deny. Agnosticism can sometimes include a certain search for God, but it can equally express indifferentism, a flight from the ultimate question of existence, and a sluggish moral conscience. Agnosticism is all too often equivalent to practical atheism.

The final portion of the Catechism’s treatment of this Commandment addresses the reality that the Church in her tradition, and today, venerates images and statues, which may seem to go against this Commandment.  But it does not.   The Church does not adore statues, only God.  Venerate means to give honor, which is perfectly suitable to give to our fellow man.  When we venerate an image, we venerate the person imaged.   The statues are not God.  On the other hand, to adore, as we mentioned in the first post on this Commandment is to yes honor, but also acknowledge God as God, and acknowledge we are not, and as a result of that acknowledgement, praise and worship him.  So there is no contradiction here; the Commandment forbids worshiping images, which we do not.

So, there is a lot involved to make sure we are giving proper acceptance and worship to God.  There are a number of different ways we can sin against this Commandment as we have outlined in these three posts.   It is good to regularly review these lists of sins, and see which ones are pervasive in our lives, especially when we prepare to go to the Sacrament of Confession, and to attend Mass.  We need to regularly do a check and see just how authentic our love for God really is.  We will never get it 100% right this side of the grave, but we do need to make sure we are at least moving forward, accepting him, trusting him, and  loving him more and more each day.  If we are involved regularly with any of the sins discussed in this post especially, it makes the journey much more difficult.   Let's stay away from them.

We have now gone through each of the 10 Commandments.   I am going to do one more post as kind of a wrap up to this series, in which I will give one more look at the Commandments overall.

Joseph, foster father of the Son of God, pray for us.