Just Looking ...

The idea of idolatry always nagged at me because it seems as if something is missing. The idea of idolatry seems like a circular reasoning, at least in the religious sense. The basic idea is that the creation of an image to represent something such as god is degrading because the image is then idolized as god himself. It also degrades the all-powerfulness of god through the impossible task of representing the powers of god into something less than perfect. But this idea seems to me as a faulty argument. In order for the image to be idolatrous, isn’t it necessary to assume that the image is a representation of god and all his power? The image becomes idolatrous because this assumption is made. So for the taboo of creating images to represent god, this taboo in itself establishes the relationship between images and idolatry.

It seems to me that the more focus is placed on images as being idolatrous, the more the images become idolatrous. Why can an image of god not simply be a vehicle that aids in the practice of a religion? Why not preach this idea rather than ban all images? Are human minds innately susceptible in viewing images as living representations of whatever it is thought to portray, or is it just due to our own creation of the symbolic system, one that has led to the rise of culture? If so, then is it the rise of culture that has given us the ability to commit idolatry? I am not quite sure what to make of this. However, my personal opinion is that by banning images due possible idolizing, it creates blind adherence to the symbolic, tying us into hyperreality due to the assumption of images as being more than simply a symbol. To break from this (or at least understand the world as symbolic), we must remove the ban in order to understand the truth of the images as simply a vehicle of the symbolic as opposed to being the “truth.”