“Because
here's something else that's weird but true: in the
day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such
thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god
or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it
YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or
some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much
anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship
money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in
life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have
enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and
sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and
age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they
finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff
already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs,
clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great
story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily
consciousness.
Worship
power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will
need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up
feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found
out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is
not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're
unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the
kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,
getting more and more selective about what you see and how you
measure value without ever being fully aware that that's
what you're doing.”
― David
Foster Wallace, This is Water