IDOLATRY AND DOGMATISM: THE VEILS OF MAYA

The Divine as a transcendent reality no more possesses anger and jealousy and is no more a judge, than he is a person with hands and feet. If one rejects the idea that God can have any image or human representation, then certainly God cannot have any human emotions or partialities either. Therefore he can have no only Son, final prophet, or one scripture, as these are all material limitations which no Spiritual Reality can be attributed with.

Yet if God can metaphorically be described in symbols and images, his traits can be metaphorically described through emotions. Saying that God is jealous can be a metaphor for indicating that only the eternal endures and whatever transient thing we are attached to must be taken away from us by the force of time.

To say that God is a stern judge be a metaphor for saying that the law of karma, which is a product of Divine wisdom and natural law, is the real giver of good or bad results, which cannot be altered by human wishes. Such metaphors should never be taken literally or we destroy their real meaning.

Hindu deities like Shiva and his wife Parvati have such terrible forms and emotional expressions to express their transcendence of the human condition and its dualities of high and low, good and evil, but these are never taken literally. And they are never made the basis of holy wars and ethnic cleansings in the name of religion.

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