Worship

This started life as a comment at Disputations, but I felt like it stood on its own, even out of context.

My objection to the worship of God has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the word worship. It connotes all the sinful aspects of idolatry, without making clear that idolatry (the corrupt form of worship) is the only experience most of us have of the word. If people only ever experienced gluttony when eating food, the verb "to eat" would be as negative as "worship" is for me. But if one begins to recognize that "worship of God" is to "worship" as "eating" is to "bingeing to extreme excess," the word gets much less problematic.