Opposition From Abrahamic Religions
Members of Abrahamic religions identify cult images as "idols" and their worship as "idolatry", the worship of hollow forms. The paradox inherent in the worship of cult images was given classic expression in the Book of Isaiah:
Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made. —Isaiah 2.8, reflected in Isaiah Isaiah.The avoidance of such a degrading paradox was expressed in the early Christian idea of miraculous icons that were not made by human hands, acheiropoietoi. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians make an exception for the veneration of image of saints, which is not considered by them to be adoration or latria. The word idol entered Middle English in the 13th century from Old French idole adapted in Ecclesiastical Latin from the Greek eidolon ("appearance" extended in later usage to "mental image, apparition, phantom"). Greek eidos was employed by Plato and the Platonists to signify perfect immutable "forms".
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Famous quotes containing the words opposition and/or religions:
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)