Tract 4: Idolatry is Worse than Murder

Tract 4: Idolatry is Worse than Murder

God has revealed a succession of major prophets and every single time, whether it was Zohar, Moses, Jesus, or Mohamad, each one of them has reaffirmed just how much God hates idolatry and how seriously he takes it. With every iterative prophet God does not just reiterate this commandment but also further emphasizes it. It is almost as if God keeps reminding us, we drift from his message, and so he must remind us again but louder and more explicitly. Yet humanity's desire to tokenize God is so overwhelming even learned religiously minded individuals find themselves attempting to normalize it.

Consider the Second Council of Nicaea, the last time the Orthodox Christians and the Catholics ever agreed on anything. God does not warn us against the things we have no inclination to do—he warns us against the things that we will find tempting. Images of Jesus were popular amongst the laity and many argued, having images of Jesus was just affirming your love for him. If God did not want us doing that he would have explicitly told us something like, “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”.

This of course is a joke, God did gift man exactly those words so there was not the slightest room for misinterpretation and put this commandment literally right under the first commandment so there is no misunderstanding that he might have meant just don’t worship images/idols, (as that would be covered in the first commandment). To God this commandment came even above the commandment to not murder or steal yet the desire to create these images is so strong in man almost every abrahamic faction has fallen to it to some extent or another.

I don’t point this out to rag on Orthodox and Catholic Christians but to point out how quickly even pious men break from God's rules around Idolatry. Of all God’s commandments it is the commandment pios individuals find hardest to keep and that is why it is so emphasized among all God's prophets.

Why is idolatry so uniquely offensive to God?

Why do humans struggle so much with this clear and repeated commandment from God?

God delivers his revelation through a succession of prophets because man's capacity for understanding him increases over time. Bronze Age pastoralists did not have the capacity to spread the message of anything other than an anthropomorphised God combined with mystical hudu. However, we are not Bronze Age pastoralists and as such God expects us to reinterpret his revelations with pragmatic logic. God is not the type of petty entity capable of offense or jealousy—if he has given us a commandment he has given it to us for our own benefit—and only for our own benefit.

He warns us against idolatry because it is in our own best interest. Wait what? How?

People make images of God because it allows them to feel closer to him or at least a representation of him. Why does God warn us against this? Because that image is not Him. A picture of Jesus is as far from God as a picture of a red hooven being with a goatee and praying to each is exactly equally harmful to the human soul. Whatever entity is represented in that image it is not God and as your heart moves closer to it, it moves further from God. All representations of God made by man that are assigned theological significance move man further from God.

This truth reveals two things. First it is not the act of someone drawing God or one of his intermediaries that is being warned against—it is assigning theological significance to that drawing in an effort to get closer to God. The sin was that people believed these physical items made by men were a conduit through which they could interact with God.

For this reason when a Muslim extremist smashes a statue of Buddah that no one has worshiped in a century, they commit an act of Sin by destroying a piece of cultural heritage that could inform us about the nature of man. At the same time if that same Muslim writes a line from the Quran as a piece of Art or bans the burning of Quran as a physical object of theological significance they are committing the highest form of idolatry. When a Muslim adorns a Mosque with gold believing that in some way an earthly metal has the capacity to “improve” the Mosque they are acting in direct rebellion to God's will. Every geometric pattern, every ounce of gold leaf, every physical book that was treated as sacred—instead of the words and concepts within it—shackles the soul of the idolater and drags it towards the deceiver.

Once we understand why God warns us so frequently and explicitly about idolatry we learn there is a much deeper meaning to be examined here outside, “smash statues”. Man as he exists today is incapable of conceiving of God. When man attempts to conceive of God what he holds within his mind is a repugnant rat king when contrasted with God's glory. The images of God that humans create, not just the ones in the physical world but also the ones in our mind move us further from God. To attempt to grasp God's majesty with our fallen minds is crime in God's eyes worse than murder because it is more harmful to our souls.

This becomes uniquely important to individuals that think they have the ability to “talk with God,” that they have a personal relationship with God. The thing they are talking to is not God, it is themselves, their personal wish for what God was like ... but it is not what God is like and therefore leads them further from God's Glory. Man as he exists now can not have a relationship with God. As Winwood reade writes, “We teach that there is a God, but not a God of the anthropoid variety, not a God who is gratified by compliments in prose and verse, and whose attributes can be cataloged by theologians. God is so great that he cannot be defined by us. God is so great that he does not deign to have personal relations with us human atoms that are called men. Those who desire to worship their Creator must worship him through mankind.”

This is why when we tell our children to pray to supernatural agents we tell them to pray to their distant descendants. This is not them talking to an imaginary entity or modeling an entity whose structure and consciousness they could not possibly predict but instead a real being that will one day exist and therefore not a form of idolatry. Through modeling a genetically and synthetically augmented but still human mind, one with an iteratively clearer understanding of the true nature of God, they are able to get closer to what God wants from them without risking blaspheme. Moreover, it is self-evident within our religious framework that God wants us to do our best to increase the potentiality of future humans ,and thus us modeling what they would want from us and what they would reward us for doing helps us model what God would want to say to us without committing idolatry.

Do we really think children are able to communicate with their distant descendants? No. However, we do believe that this framing for the emulated mental model created within my kids' brains that they are communicating with will create responses closer to God's will than attempting to directly model the will of God with the human mind. When humans attempt to model God they create the way they wish He existed rather than how He does which leads to sinful self indulgence.

This reminds me of a woman we know who told us she always listened to her husband except when God told her otherwise ... how very convenient that God had a pension for her preferred indulgences.

The human soul is weak. God foresaw that some individuals would use the symbols of human vanity and social status—gold, gems, and art—to affirm their connection to God among the simple minded. These nefarious servants of the Basilisk could then use this status they had acquired to sell access to God and thus increase the earthly wealth that affirmed their