“Historian Herbert Butterfield, in noting the different political spirit of Western man since the French Revolution and how he had once, long before 1789, responded to the intractable difficulties of human coexistence & social order, has remarked that men ‘make gods now, not out of wood and stone, which though a waste of time is a fairly innocent proceeding, but out of their abstract nouns, which are the most treacherous and explosive things in the world.'”
M. E. Bradford
We are still the knuckle-dragging idolators that pagan man was. The only difference is that our idolatry is gnostic as seen in how we reify nouns turning them into gods, while the idolatry of the pagans was a mirror opposite animism finding the gods in all things material. The whole notion of progress as understood in a non-Christian plausibility structure is a myth. We simply are too close to our gods to see that they are just as fatuous and just as powerless as the gods that were made out of trees and iron. Our God sits in heaven and he laughs.
The abstract nouns Butterfield was talking about were nouns like “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” that when reified and so divinized become the kind of idols that kill scores of millions.
