Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, Part 2

Thou shalt not make for yourself a graven image

I grew up with a painting of Jesus on the wall that made him look vaguely like Charlton Heston. Such paintings bedecked the walls of lots of people back then; maybe they still do. The Roman church and its believers have for millennia put crucifixes on the walls of their churches, buildings, and homes, not to mention the vast quantity of other sacred art portraying Jesus, the saints, even God the Father. I saw Michelangelo’s Pieta when it was in New York when I was a teenager and even as a teenager, I felt its power. It is a magnificent piece of art. It also violates the second commandment.

If we assume, as the ruling elites of Louisiana do, that God himself (sic) wrote the ten commandments, then he understood himself to be pure spirit, which could not be represented by any outward form, which then would tend to attract worship in his stead, as the golden calf famously did in the Bible’s case study of the matter in Exodus 32. God wanted his followers to worship him in spirit and in truth, not in outward forms. This is the very foundation of the Quaker approach to worship.