Certainly the presence of crosses, statues and images of saints are one of the reasons why Christianity might be mislabeled as idol worship. But there is a valid reason. God is one, not three and to say that God is both three and one (by some mystery) strikes the pure monotheist as polytheism. God is the creator and alone. Only to him is it worthy to pray. Christianity says that something existed with God from the start and that is the Son and the only way to pray to the father is through the son. This is not monotheism.
The issue of prayer: that God only hears prayers that are channeled through Jesus is particularly galling, if not from the idol worship point of view, then from the “God only hears our prayers” point of view. I’m not sure all Jews would agree with this, but my impression was that the Jewish God had particularly good hearing and even if you prayed to your ancestors (as long as you had a broken heart) God was near to you and heard your prayers.
If God is particularly attentive to prayers at a place (Jerusalem’s temple) or at a time: (Day of Atonement and fast days are when god is particular attentive), these contain elements of impurity: that God has human traits to be attentive at particular times. In fact to attribute to God caring about humans seems to give God a human trait as well. Some Jews (Maimonides) believe that the sacrifices in the Temple were a concession to human frailty and thus were limited to a particular time period. But even Jews who believe that the Temple will be rebuilt and the sacrifices reinstituted, still it is to the one God that the prayers and the sacrifices will be dedicated and aimed.
In fact the two names given to God in the Hebrew Bible- (YHWH) pronounced Adonai (or Adoshem) , meaning Lord and elohim pronounced elokim, meaning God can be taken for the start of a nonmonotheistic strain (thread) of Judaism. Certainly there are those who see Judaism in its roots to believe in many gods, but that Adonai was the most powerful of the gods. but the Kabbala attributing the element of justice or punishment to the name of elohim and the attribute of mercy to the name Adonai, to this day complicates Judaism’s purity of monotheism.
My own attitude is that God (or the god that I wish would exist) is close to the broken of heart and hears all prayers. I accept that there is a type of intolerance present in monotheism that seems not to be present in polytheism, but because of the emphasis on God’s oneness in the key prayer of the Shma I cannot get past oneness as a key attribute of God and a true understanding of God. These days my God is very laissez- faire and a bit weak as well. I do not accept earthquakes for one as being a necessity, but rather a fact that illustrates the imperfection of God’s creation. I consider the creation of life- from insects to humans to be something that cannot be explained by science and indicates to me some creative force beyond explanation and this I call God. I pray, because I prayed when I was younger. I struggle so that my prayer does not excuse my inaction, but there can be a type of humility that prayer contains and I find the alternative of arrogance at the root of most of humanity’s problems. There are certainly pitfalls contained in belief in God, as in the arrogant believers who believe their God entitles them to oppress others. This is an abyss that may be difficult to avoid. But part of life is a struggle to attain a true assessment of reality and the existence of a god, one god, who hears prayers, (even if he does little about what he hears) is part of the reality that I live in, in my believing moments.
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