THE BOOK OF WISDOM EXPOSES CATHOLIC IDOLATRY

The Book of Wisdom points out that people worship monarchs and if they cannot see them they worship statues of them instead. So the worshippers instead of giving the worship to the monarch use a statue to give it to. Yet they lie to themselves that it is about the monarch. This is an extremely good point.

Catholics say that their veneration of statues of the saints is not about the statues but the person depicted, the real person.  They seem to think that idolatry is simply the veneration of fictitious creatures.  It is hard to believe that when the pagans were idolaters for honouring statues of real rulers that the Catholics are somehow too good to fall into the same trap.

Another gem comes from Wisdom 14 that idol worship leads to degeneration and corruption. It says that as the idol had a beginning and will have an end that the only reason you worship them is because of your vanity. It is not obvious that demeaning yourself by adoring a thing that can be destroyed any time is vanity. It can look like humility. But even humility itself is pride when you want to show it off.  You can be proud of how humble you are.  In that case you are not humble at all.

Jesus pointed out that if you avoid being seen when you do good you are truly good and humble.  But then he ruined this by saying God sees you.  So pride is brought back in after all.  If God belief is a crutch, then you are using it as a crutch to feel he is there approving of you.

The book is thought to say that God did not make all things from nothing but from material he already had. That was a popular idea among the Greeks at the time. If so, then matter is as good as God. Maybe even better?  It was always there. So idolatry then could hardly be that bad!