As for your "image" thesis, it's absolute nonsense. This stuff is propagated by the deliberately obtuse or willfully mischievous.
Do you perhaps have a photo in your wallet of a spouse or a parent or a child? What is the purpose of that photo? Is it to supplant and take the place of the real thing? Or is it a reminder of that loved one and to make him or her more present to you? Is your wife jealous of the photo which you keep of her in your wallet? The very idea is laughable, isn't it?
Even in the secular sphere, we build statues of men who've accomplished what we consider to be great things. The Lincoln Memorial sits in pride of place up there in DC, for example. The dollar bill has Washington's face on it. And so on.
It's no different in the spiritual sphere. Jesus was a man. He walked this earth. As did his Blessed Mother and the Apostles. We remember them with love in their images.
Ironically of course, the things which truly turn us away from God are not built of plaster or glass. They're in our heart. Materialism, avarice, jealousy, love of money, lust, fornication etc etc.
It pains me to have to write this stuff, it's so self-evident but there may be someone wandering through this thread who is helped by it.
And when even their writers won't put their names to an article. well...
And your opinion concerning WND is pure Ad Hominem.
As for the rest of that 'comparing apples to oranges argument' of yours, I said earlier that those who lived during the Apostolic Age as well as the Early Church Fathers, weren't opposed to art in and of itself - so they wouldn't be opposed to someone having pictures in their wallet of loved ones.
If you would have bothered look at all of the ECF quotes that I gave, you would have saw that they were against giving reverence to art and images or giving reverence to what the art and images supposedly represented.
To quote them in a nutshell: art and images cannot be sacred and divine, one should abstain from paying reverence to religious art and images/what religious art and images represent, religious images are nothing, it is vain to form religious images.
Hopefully you are learning a thing or two. I am trying to be patient with everyone here.
I think the gays and MSM lapdogs are (and have been) attacking Catholicism any way they can, especially over the Church's stance on the "gay marriage" issue.
Sad to see WND buy in.