Are Buddhist emptiness and Christian idolatory similar?

[Mike]

Never crossed my mind before but this is an interesting snip in re: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/nov/01/church-of-england-occupy-london-protesters

But what if this was the right battle for the Occupy movement? What if they needed the church to have a crisis of conscience? In 2008 [The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan] Williams wrote an article for the Spectator titled, "Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism". If that was not enough of a red rag to a bull, he said in the article:

    "Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian scriptures call idolatry.

    "What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to 'keep ourselves from idols', in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose – which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust."

That wasn't the only time either. In 2009 he wrote: "We haven't heard people saying, 'Well actually, no, we got it wrong. And the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty'," regarding the bankers and the financial crisis.