To bring a religious angle here: one reason for avodah zara is people’s inability to connect things to the source – they are looking for some immediate source of fire or water or parnasa. So, among other middos, a religious person requires daas that helps him appreciate how events in the world connect back to the Prime Source. Without such daas, one might be ortho-prax just because he is trained to mumble brochos, bot not ortho-dox. So, when some people can not connect obvious things, such as government making oil business harder to increased gas prices shows that they can’t properly connect their life to Hashem also.
