Now, to make myself clear, the Catholic doctrine forbids adoration of statues, images, or of any being or person other than Almighty God. The same goes for all other Christian denominations of which I am aware.
All of us believe n adoration of the Creatror alone; never the creature. Any assertion to the contrary is based on ignorance ---I hope. No Christians are polytheist: I suppose that's a tautology, since it is implied in the definition of Christian.
I am at a lost how to explain the very, very small subset of people on FR who don't get this; who misinterpret all of the common forms of religious veneration found in the Bible, as adoration. I assume you understand the difference between the two, as they occur so frequently in the Bible --- Abigail prostrating to David; David bowing to the Temple; Solomon bowing low to Bathsheba --- and yet you continue to misinterpret them when done by Christians, after it has been explained to them exhaustively. ("Exhaustively" --- THAT is the word.
So I must close my portion of the discussion, on which I have probably spent too much time.
If my toast is now blackened --- OK, it's a burnt offering. Good day to you and to all.
BTW, I m having a computer screen problem --- letters displayed almost illegibly --- so this may or may not signal the end of my FR activity for awhile, unless my husband figures out how to fix it! If you're a praying person, pray :o)
I am at a lost how to explain the very, very small subset of people on FR who don't get this; who misinterpret all of the common forms of religious veneration found in the Bible, as adoration.
There isn't any Christian veneration in the Bible to anyone other than God...So we don't misinterpret anything...And I'd say we don't get what you say because apparently your religion teaches otherwise...
"If the Son is a King," says an ancient writer, "the Mother who begot him is rightly and truly considered a Queen and Sovereign". "No sooner had Mary," says St. Bernadine of Sienna, "consented to be Mother of the Eternal Word, than she merited by this consent to be made Queen of the world and of all creatures." "Since the flesh of Mary," remarks the Abbot Arnold of Chartres, "was not different from that of Jesus, how can the royal dignity of the Son be denied to the Mother? Hence we must consider the glory of the Son, not only as being common to, but as one with, that of His mother."
Although a queen, Mary, is not a queen of justice, intent on the punishment of the wicked, but a queen of mercy, intent only on commiserating and pardoning sinners. And this is the reason why the Church requires that we should expressly call her "the Queen of Mercy." Commenting on the words of David: "These two things have I heard, that power belongs to God, and mercy to You, O Lord," - the Medieval author John Gerson writes: "The kingdom of God consists in power and mercy; reserving the power to Himself, He, in some way, yielded the emperor of mercy to His Mother." This is confirmed by St. Thomas, in his Preface to the Canonical Epistles, saying, "that when the Blessed Virgin conceived the Eternal Word in her womb, and brought Him forth, she obtained half the kingdom of God; so that she is Queen of Mercy, as Jesus Christ is King of Justice."
And if Jesus is the King of the universe, Mary is also its Queen. "And as Queen," says the Abbot Rupert, "she possesses, by right, the whole kingdom of her Son." St. Bernadine of Sienna concludes that "as many creatures as there are who serve God, so many there are who serve Mary: for as angels and men, and all things that are in heaven and on earth are subject to the empire of God, so are they also under the dominion of Mary." The Abbot Guarricus, addressing himself to the Divine Mother on this subject, says:
If Mary is Divine, she requires worship...