What’s tripping you up?

The Israelites were cool with all the commandments except for one: The Second. “Why no art? Why would God not want us to do something so fundamental to human nature? Why would God want to take such a thing as His symbols, away from us?”

As we discussed previously, Symbols are something that connects humans to much bigger things. So what meant here, with the no images of God was that their symbol of God, the images that brought them closer to God were to be taken away from them. It’s like destroying a flag of a nation in front of a patriot.

“Symbols are among humanity’s most useful inventions, a short-hand way of capturing big abstract subjects such as the idea of a nation. And when writing was invented, they became even more useful. You could now translate anything into words in a book you could hold in your hands. The mistake was to confuse the words with what they stood for and treat them as if they were the same. Things are never what we say they are. You can’t drink the word water. It’s the sign for water, not the water itself. The trouble is that believers often treat religious words as if that rule didn’t apply to them. It was as if their words for God were God. Their books weren’t ink marks on paper but God himself compressed between covers. No wonder they often ended up fighting with each other over who had the best words and the best symbols for God. None of them comes close, thundered the God of the Second Commandment. No human art of any sort, whether in the form of pictures on a wall or words in a book gets anywhere near conveying the mystery of God.”

“The Second Commandment was the most important insight into God ever discovered by humans. Its real target was religion[…]It was warning us that no religious system could capture or contain the mystery of God. Yet in history, as we’ll see, that’s exactly what many of them would go on to claim. The Second Commandment was an early warning that the organisations that claimed to speak for God would become God’s greatest rivals, the most dangerous idols of all.”

Richard Holloway