Idolatry and Monotheism

Judaism

From the Old Testament:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any like­ness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: (Exo­dus, 20)

Refer­ring to the golden calf, Jews wor­shiped in Moses absence.

The statue of the golden Calf prop­erly was inher­ited from the Egypt­ian God “Apis” which is in the form of an ox sym­bol­ise strength, in the later Bible sto­ries the qual­ity of the Jew­ish kings and judges were mea­sured by their fights against idolatry.

Chris­tian­ity

In 787 Empress Irene issued a law called “idol­a­try con­vic­tion”.
In the 9th cen­tury empresses Theodora issued a law allow­ing the use of two dimen­sional stat­ues and icons while in Rome the Church was allow­ing the use of three dimen­sional statues.

Islam

There is nowhere in the Quran says: imag­ing the prof­its is for­bid­ding, much of this believe comes from Mohammad’s life and his quotes.

By the Sun­nis imag­ing the profit Moham­mad or the four ortho­dox caliphs is absolutely for­bid­den, in some Sunni sects (ie Wah­habi) any­thing sym­bol­izes the dead will be con­sid­ered idol­a­try (Saudi Arabia……no ceme­ter­ies), the Islamists in Egypt con­sider the pyra­mids as idol­a­try also.

You can com­pare Shiia to Catholics, Shiia use images and por­traits of their reli­gious men in their holy cities Najaf, Kar­bala (Iraq), Qom (Iran).

There also por­traits of Moham­mad and Jesus in he city of Qom…Iran.

Use­ful links

1– Muham­mad in the Bible (Mus­lims think that Moham­mad was men­tioned the Bible).

2– Vir­gins? What vir­gins? (Old arti­cle from 2002 but it a very good writ­ten by Ibn War­raq reveals the truth behind the vir­gins in par­adise)