(May 30, 2015 at 11:13 pm)Exian Wrote:
Quote:I also think a lot about how the god of the bible is constantly reminding his followers that he is invisible and doesn't want anything made of wood or stone worshiped in place of him. I find that interesting since most gods have some kind of image that was worshiped too. It seems like the human inclination is to worship things that we can see.
This, to me, seems like the flavor of that particular month. The idea of the abstract was a gradual invention and ability of the human mind. Consider how the earliest religions started with worshiping tangible things like animals or the son/moon. This evolved to more fantastic ideas of half-human/half-animals, which evolved to become completely abstract ideas of what a god is.
And I can't seem to ignore that, even though an idol-less god was the original plan, man couldn't help but build statues of Jesus or to commission paintings of God himself. Christianity is filled to the brim with imagery, even though, as you've said, god reminds us that he is invisible. Man, uhhhh uh uhhhh finds a way.
Did the Greeks believe that statues were their actual deities or did they use them the same way that Christians use paintings and carvings of Jesus and other religious figures? The early Hebrews built an ark to house their god and there is imagery of a god in the bible, the burning bush, walking in the garden of Eden and even like a cloud pillar in Exodus. It seems as if the Hebrews concept of god changed with the rest of the world's.
