Replies

Re: A jealous God who wants man’s attention and praises and who worries about competition.

It is really another sad example of how religion has cheapened God’s image, reducing Him to no better than or even worse than a human being.
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Let’s look at the issue from other angles.

1. Even for true believers who can see God’s hand everywhere in nature, myself included, God is still a very fuzzy idea. That is, we have no concrete image to associate Him with.

(Incidentally, that is the reason people make idols so they can have something tangible when they pay tribute to their gods.)

We can tell one person from another, and can recognize one individual out of millions. With God, we don’t have that luxury. We cannot even agree on His exact name. All we have is the belief and reverence in our hearts directed at a higher power. It is reasonable to think those exact same sentiments are what people worshipping idols have in their hearts as well. One can therefore argue they are actually worshipping their gods, some forms of higher power, not the physical idols. Bottom line is, we don’t know exactly who God is, how the pipeline (of communication) to a higher power actually works. Given the fact that God is the only higher power, there is a distinct possibility that all the pipelines that ever existed since the dawn of mankind all lead to the one and the same God Almighty.
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2. Suppose there is a child whose mother is away. The child takes her mother’s picture or an object that belongs to her and treats it with all the love she has for her mother: caressing and kissing it as if it was her mother. Do you think the mother would be jealous of the object getting all of the child’s love and attention?
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3. Portraits of Mary, Jesus, figurines and other objects figure prominently in Catholicism. Is that not idol worship in the church itself? (By the way, I have seen pictures supposedly of Jesus with very long hair, even though it was a disgrace for men to have long hair in Jesus’ time, according to the NT).