Catholics are Guilty of Image Worship which their God says is a sin

The Essentials:  God is love, infinite love, beyond all our understanding.  Idolatry confuses the creator and creature and that is bad for only uncreated infinite love matters. Even if it does not exist it still matters.  If infinite love ideally should exist and does not anything that substitutes it with something inferior or shabby is still bad. And religious belief says it matters because it exists. An image of divine love cannot be anything like divine love.  Using images means your reaching out to God stops at his representation.  Using a saint to represent God is putting a stop before the representation of God.  Nothing can convey the greatness of God.

Catholicism says saints do not get the full honour that God gets and you can give the saints honour by honouring their statues and images.  If it really believes that when why not give an image of God FULL worship for it will to God anyway?  It knows from the Bible that this would be a step too far and idolatry. I am talking about an image of God as opposed to an image of Jesus.  Even though the Church regards Jesus as God in human flesh it says it does not honour his image as if it were God himself.  If your heart is fixed on God you won't need props such as images. And also, you simply CAN'T need them. If you love your wife, you won't need her to be healthy and beautiful to help you love her. Thus image worship is always idolatry. The Christian God is supposed to be the true God. Catholics have the true God if that is true and they turn away from him and use props to substitute for him. Thus they are worse than the idolaters among the pagans for those idolaters didn't know any better. And yet their worship was classed as an abomination. So what does that say about the Catholic worship????? Idolatry is a problem because its the worship of something that is not God and also because it is about controlling how you worship instead of caring how God or any deity wants to be worshipped. It is possible to intend to be a good person and worship the wrong thing. But you cannot be a good person if you engage in worship that is all about doing what you want. That is not worship however good it feels.
 
Cursed be anyone who makes an idol or casts an image, anything abhorrent to the Lord, the work of an artisan, and sets it up in secret. —Deuteronomy 27:15.
 
This condemns not just idolatry but using an image to help in worship. Jeremiah 10 condemns the use of a tree as an object of worship. Evidently an idol could be anything not just a statue.
 
Deuteronomy refers to setting up a secret image and condemns that. Notice that worship is not explicitly mentioned in relation to the image. But the worship of images or using images to help worship - be it God or fake gods - is implicitly condemned.
 
It is easy for a person to honour a saint and an image without caring about God or without using them to get closer to God. And it is even easier for them to tell themselves that they are doing it for God. We see nothing to persuade us that Catholics intend their honouring of saints to be really about honouring God. They see the glory of men and women but that is not the same thing as seeing that of God. They are not putting their attention on God but at best they are putting it on what God has made of the saints. Sounds like the message of Paul in Romans 1 where he says that all see that God exists and they still go and adore what he has made instead of him. If you really adored God as he is said to deserve, you would rejoice so much and adore him so thoroughly that there would be no need for images. The use of images and prayers to saints is a sign that one wants to be religiously distracted from God. God is supposed to be personal - he has personality and loves us. He is also supposed to be seen as if he were goodness itself. The Christian is meant to combine and reconcile these two approaches. To pray to a saint because they manifest the goodness of God blocks that reconciliation. You need to encounter God directly to do it.

The Catholics may say that they do not pray to images or likenesses for they can neither see or hear or help them. Does that mean they would pray to them if they could see and hear and help? Isaiah 41:22 says a pagan god that cannot foretell things to come is not a god at all. Clearly you are expected to get a prediction that comes true if you are presented with something such as a statue or communion wafer that is claimed to be God.

Paul in Romans 1 says that people changed the glory of the pure and immaculately good God into the image of corruptible man and even of birds and insects. If God made man in his image is that so bad? Paul speaks of corruptible man not corrupted man. So the problem is not that manlike gods are bad moral examples but the problem is that they are men. For Paul, worship of man whether as man or in the image of man is wrong for only God is incorruptible.  A saint may now be beyond sin but is still inherently corruptible and is protected by God from evil.  So worship of man is out.
 
It is interesting how the Jews like the Protestants never used sacred images in their homes even as reminders of God. They did not set them up in their synagogues or Temples. That is enough to show that Catholicism is on shaky ground by using images. The Jews and the Protestants are probably right to think images are banned. And if God gave the Bible to the Jews as they say, then the Jews were in a position to know that when God banned images he meant it.

Uncanny valley means that our brains are wired to recognise real faces. If a face is not real like the face of a doll that unsettles us. It makes us uncomfortable. Why then do Catholics and Orthodox go for sinister images? We are surely unsettled naturally if we are told that the wafer is Jesus in another form. Nature has made us to recognise faces so that we can have tribes and get help from each other. A doll or holy statue or whatever seems to mock this and try to wreck that instinct we have. It attacks what we are. A doll a child grows out of is one thing but religion never lets you grow out of statues of Jesus and the saints!
 



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