When the Orthodox venerate an Icon of a Saint, we are not bowing down to paint and wood, nor are we bowing down to the Saint, but rather we are venerating the Christ in that Saint, and we are humbling ourselves in the process. The honor goes to the prototype, which is Christ our God. All of the faithful within the body of Christ are “baptized into Christ”, and have “put on Christ”. In our unity of faith, we therefore look to the Christ within one another. It is a wonderful reminder that when we come upon a fellow Christian in faith and love, WE are the lower one and we bow low before the Christ showing forth in them.
So what you’re really asking is that we stop bowing before Christ. We respectfully decline.
I understand that reasoning, and how the Orthodox believe that they are guiltless in engaging in these practices. However, you can rationalize anything that you want to, if you are intent on finding a way to justify it. I’d rather be on the safe side, and take God at His word, rather than hope that the rationalizations of men will turn out to hold water with Him.
“So what you’re really asking is that we stop bowing before Christ. We respectfully decline.”
No, I really just asking why we aught not to obey the letter of the commandment, instead of trying to find a way to justify an apparent violation of it. Apparent, meaning it has every appearance of a violation to an outside observer. Perhaps your arguments are correct, and the violation is not real and only apparent. I’m not at the point of accepting that myself, but I’m willing to concede it’s a possibility. I believe, though, in a matter of such grave consequence, we aught to have more than a simple possibility before we throw caution to the wind.
There are quite a few other issues I have with this topic, but that’s the big one. Nobody can demonstrate with any true certainty, in this world, that God won’t reckon these acts to be grossly sinful, while we can demonstrate with certainty that abstaining from these acts would not be sinful at all. Tis better to err on the side of caution.