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!