What is idolatry? First brake the word down. Take the word "idol" is an image that is blindly adored, or given excessive devotion to. It can be the worship of any created object by God or mankind. There are several forms of idolatry, like Fetishism (fetish) the worship of animals, trees, rivers, mountains and stones; Sabaism, consist on adoration of sun, moon, and stars or other heavenly bodies; Shintoism, worship of deceased ancestors or national leaders including martyrs; Idealism, excessive devotion to abstrations, ideas or Mental qualities . All these forms of idolatries includes some form of religious truths or a mixture of religion, error or falsehood.
Idolatry is a perverse and distorted system of replacing the Almighty with things, objects, people and the like. The well informed, civilized idolaters replaces the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, the God of all creation with an atheistic view that denies the existance of God and his son Jesus Christ. Standing firm in denouncing the Christian Bible as a book of myths instead of a divine inspired revelation of God's communication with man and man communicating with God. The proof of our Creator physical, moral, and spiritual evidences are considered void to such people.
The fact that they know deep in their hearts that God is real because God has put the truth of his existance in every living person so that they will not have an excuse at time of judgment of not knowing, they freely choose to ignore or deny all the evidences. They don't want or will not believe in a Creator endowed with supreme power, justice and love. Instead they choose to believe a lie.
Pagan religions worship other man made Gods, described as being made of gold, silver, wood, and stone. These Gods were unable to have any wisdom nor speak, see, hear,and had no power to rescue nor to secure peace or defeat death and sicknesses. They show their adoration to these dead idols called Gods by a set of practices such as sex rites, cultic male and female prostitution, passing a child through a fire to Molech, child, person or animal sacrifices
Idolatry is not limited to the worship of a statue or picture itself, but also includes worship of the Almighty Himself with the use of mediators and/or any artistic representations of God such as "Jesus on the Cross". According to this understanding, even if one directs his worship to the Almighty Himself and not to a statue, picture, or some other created thing, but yet he uses a created thing as a representation of the Almighty in order to assist in his worship of the Almighty, this is also considered a form of idolatry.
All forms of religious objects whether in three dimensional or two dimensional form are considered wrong. The Bible says, "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them" That will included statues of saints, the use of icons, veneration of religious pictures, God like living person as representatives appointed by man himself.
God is an eternal spirit, no image has been declared authentic. The danger of images is that a false picture or drawing of God could lead to worshipping that image and not the true God of Abraham. God considers idolatry a sin and worship of anything but the God of creation is idolatry.
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