| View Poll Results: Allegation of Catholic Idolatry | |||
| I agree: Catholics worship Mary, the saints and statues |    | 6 | 3.85% |
| That is completely wrong and here's why. |    | 150 | 96.15% |
| Voters: 156. | |||
Okay let's try this again...
Welcome!
A graven image according to the context of the 1st commandment is anything that a person would construct in order to give it the worship that is due only to God. Now, that said, it could also include anything that we choose to make more important than God in our lives, such as money, career, or power. The Catechism of the Catholic Church gets into it more here: http://www.christusrex.org/www1/CDHN/comm1.html#GRAVEN so you can peruse that at your convenience.
Islam forbids the display of ANY images (It's called Iconoclasm, this forbidding) and the iconoclastic heresies that have arisen in Christianity were the result of Islamic influence in about the 800's. you can find that history here at New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07620a.htm
Read the graven image part of the first commandment here:
Exodus 20:1-5
"1 And the Lord spoke all these words: 2 I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. 3 Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. 4 Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. 5 Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them: I am the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me:"
It is clear that the prohibition is not iconoclastic as you preach, but based upon the intent of the one making and using the image. Since NO CATHOLIC EVER kneels down before any image to worship it we are not idolators at all. We are not stupid enough to confuse a mass of rock, plaster, metal, or any other created thing with the almighty and ever living God of the Universe
New Advent entry on Iconoclasm. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07620a.htm
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
IV. "YOU SHALL NOT MAKE FOR YOURSELF A GRAVEN IMAGE . . ."
2129 The divine injunction included the prohibition of every representation of God by the hand of man. Deuteronomy explains: "Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure...."[66] It is the absolutely transcendent God who revealed himself to Israel. "He is the all," but at the same time "he is greater than all his works."[67] He is "the author of beauty."[68]
2130 Nevertheless, already in the Old Testament, God ordained or permitted the making of images that pointed symbolically toward salvation by the incarnate Word: so it was with the bronze serpent, the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim.[69]
2131 Basing itself on the mystery of the incarnate Word, the seventh ecumenical council at Nicaea (787) justified against the iconoclasts the veneration of icons - of Christ, but also of the Mother of God, the angels, and all the saints. By becoming incarnate, the Son of God introduced a new "economy" of images. 2132 The Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first commandment which proscribes idols. Indeed, "the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype," and "whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it."[70] The honor paid to sacred images is a "respectful veneration," not the adoration due to God alone:
Religious worship is not directed to images in themselves, considered as mere things, but under their distinctive aspect as images leading us on to God incarnate. The movement toward the image does not terminate in it as image, but tends toward that whose image it is.[71]
If the making of images is wrong as the Moslems and these misgiuded iconoclasts say then how do they account for God COMMANDING the making of images to adorn the top of the Ark of the Covenant and the brass serpent that Moses lifted up to save the Israelites that had sinned and which in fact is mentioned in the NT as a type of the lifting up of Christ for our sins? The temple of Solomon is described as having been adorned with all manner of images yet God was pleased to be present there and did not condemn them for it.
