Idols, ideals, and art!

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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 :-)

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