Idolatry
Around the times of Moses things were going well for the priests in Egypt. They had huge lavish temples adorned with golden statues of their many gods. The priests got to decide who got to worship what god and at what price. Eternity for the Egyptians came at a price, you had to pay for it. In order to take your place among the gods you had to have your body and its organs preserved in salt. They didn’t preserve the brain, the brain was removed through the nose after being dissolved in alcohol. The image of these brainless monsters coming back to life made for some good B grade movies in the fifties and sixties. And oh yea, you get to take all the stuff entombed with you to the next life.
The Hebrews were hanging around in Egypt at this time. They weren’t doing so well. The best they could manage was a roof over their head, bread, beer and perhaps a few copper coins. They didn’t have the gold and silver that could buy you into the lavish temples or the life among the gods. They got their spiritual kick by raising their hand to the Sun and calling on the creator of all things who treated all people equal and they longed to be free. Then Moses rocked up performing some really nasty magic on the Egyptians and the Hebrews walked out of Egypt carrying the pharos golden burial set with them. They end up putting the ten commandments in the largest of the gold boxes. One of them reads “Don’t worship idols.”
Around the time of Jesus the Pharisees were doing well. The Pharisees were into rules, lots of rules, I mean you thought Leviticus was a little absurd, that’s peanuts by comparison to the Pharisees. The Romans were running things at this time. The Romans were into making money and if you had enough gold you could do anything you wanted to. The Romans were taxing everything, even the temples. The temples were coming up with the required gold by practicing baptisms. OK, so you have sinned a little lately, you simply go up to the temple, hand over your gold, get dunked in a pool and go away cleansed of sin. If you were poor, you had no rights. If you were sick you had no access to the baptism pools. The Pharisees justified this by claiming that if you were sick or poor you were being punished by God for your unholiness.
Into this comes John the Baptist, giving away baptisms in the Jordan River. John lived off bugs and wild honey and preached of the coming of the saviour. Then up rocks Jesus to get a dunk and things start getting really weird. He is taken by the spirit and wonders the desert for forty days and forty nights. When he returns he starts performing miracles left right and centre so do a dozen guys he commands to hang out with him. He preaches things like, give to the poor, treat the widows well and treat each other with respect.
So they crucify him, he raises from the dead and people start seeing the light. They wonder the Mediterranean performing miracles and preaching the salvation of Christ. A few years latter the temples in Jerusalem are burned to the ground for not coming up with their taxes. Four hundred years later the church is running Europe from Rome.
Around the renascence period the Catholic Church was doing well. They had this neat little scam going called Purgatory. OK, so you think you will be forgiven for your sins? So why not sin all you want as faith will bring you to Haven regardless of how you behave? No, got you there, we’ve come up with Purgatory. In Purgatory you have your sins torn from your soul one at a time and shown to you. It takes a long time and it really hurts. But get this, if you buy a souvenir from the shop on the way out you get time off Purgatory, and the gold comes rattling in. Well a lot of people get pissed off about this and it turns into an on going series of civil wars that are still quite explosive in parts of Europe to this day.
With the age of electronics came the tele evangelist and one did particularly well. He bought a huge mirror cube to serve as the head quarters of his ministry. And put it on the land adjacent to an old style cathedral to reflect the old church in the new church.
“Hal-la-loo-ya save the lord and send five dollars to the number below your screen, our telephone lines are open so call for the Grace of God.”
But then he fell from Grace, he had obviously decided he had saved enough souls he could afford a little sin. Turns out he was holding orgies in the big mirror cube and he got caught, not a good idea to hold an orgy in a TV studio. A few years later cracks appear in the foundations of the old cathedral, it seems the big mirror cube was too heavy for the ground it was on.
Idolatry is taking possession of God, the Egyptians tried to do it with there golden statues, the Pharesees tried to do it with their dunking pools, the Catholic Church tried to do it with Purgatory and the American guy tried to do it with TV and credit cards. Faith is not to be bought and sold, it is meant to be shared. You can’t buy your way into Heaven, salvation is free.
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