ISIS on the offensive in Iraq

[Husar]

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/th...hing-the-idols

The Bible itself is full of condemnations of idols and idolatry. Exodus 20:3-4 commands the Israelites to forgo any idols, and the Golden Calf hardly comes in for praise. In Exodus 32:20, Moses smashes the Golden Calf, grinds it to dust, mixes it with water, and forces the Israelites to drink their false god. The Bible praises those who smash the idols, like Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18:3-4, where he “did right in the sight of the Lord” by smashing a serpent idol. God himself even destroys the idol of Dagon in 1 Samuel 5:1-5.

In the fourth part of the sixth-century Book of the Cave of Treasures, a Christian text, the author asserts that Satan lives in idols and pretends to be pagan gods. God, the author said, destroyed these idols:

The fact is, since the rise of monotheism nearly everyone smashes idols. (Polytheists were a mixed lot, just as likely to capture an idol and take it home as to destroy it.) The Byzantine iconoclasts and Protestant reformers both attacked Christian imagery, destroying statues and icons for violating God’s commandment. Charlemagne legislated the destruction of Germanic pagan sanctuaries. The Spanish obliterated the idols of the Mexicans and Peruvians during the Conquest of the New World. Francisco Burgoa tells in his Geographica descripcion de la America setentrional, Chapter 28, how a missionary destroyed a Mixtec idol made of nearly priceless translucent green stone by following the example of Moses, grinding it to dust, mixing it with water, pouring it onto the earth, and stomping on it to show that the Mixtec gods were powerless. Two centuries after that, the Revolutionary French smashed the stained glass images of Jesus and the saints to demonstrate the triumph of reason over religion. Two centuries later, the peoples of Eastern Europe tore down the statues of Lenin and Stalin and broke them into pieces to symbolize the destruction of Communist ideology. Early in this century, the Taliban infamously destroyed medieval statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan.

The last paragraph says that this reason is illogical since these old statues hardly qualify as idols anymore now that noone believes in their religious symbolism anymore, but one also has to take into account that one just has to be fundie enough to think that they may still be "possessed" or something and therefore deserving of destruction. The idea that human belief alone gives an idol power is an atheist idea that does not fly for religious people who believe in an invisible world beyond the one we live in.