Idols, ideals, and art!

By -


Picture owned by Pravin475     https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goddess_Durga_statue_of_2018_Durga_Puja_festival_06.jpg 

To start things off, I want to make it clear that I wasn’t able to read “Seeing the Divine Image in India'' so I had to watch the three videos on Oncourse instead. In regards to those videos, I have to say I was quite impressed by what they had to offer in terms of both the sensory and idolatry interpretations aspects of it.


First and foremost, Hindu practice not seeing idols as a bad thing didn’t really surprise me since I was already pretty aware of how casual they were about it. I was also fairly well aware of how NOT casual christianity, Judaism, and Islam were about the idea of putting Idols everywhere. Honestly I never understood the whole mentality of seeing idolatry as sin in the first place. I mean yeah, today you can’t really put up a bunch of depictions of Jesus or whoever for the sake of public tolerance but back then, it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense. God wants people to worship him and not the idols depicting him and yet...carrying crosses with Jesus on them or paintings of Jesus is more common for religious people now than ever. I should know after all, my whole family on my mom’s side is pretty religious and let me tell you something, you're not gonna go too far in ANY of their homes before seeing a picture, statue, or model of Jesus somewhere in the house. So with all that being said, it’s just kind of interesting to me how there was such a stigma towards idols of worship for such a long time.


Another thing that got my attention was the video about the Durga Puja Festival. It’s insane to me how I can go this long in life without knowing such a huge event like this even existed. Seriously, I looked up some videos and pictures of past festivals and I just love how they’ve decided to put so much attention to detail in regards to almost every aspect of those idols. Seeing all the different styles and motifs being used and seeing where the artist got their inspiration from is something else. I’d love to go some day but honestly I'm just too lazy to travel, even if I did have the money. At least I got the internet!


Comments

  1. Violet WindhamApril 10, 2022 at 8:27 AM

    This was an awesome blog post Dequan!! I agree that it's very interesting that there has been stigma toward idols of worship. I think a lot of this comes from people assuming that the idols ARE that god, which definitely isn't true in the Hindu practice. Thanks for your insight :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more