“Do not imagine God according to the lust of your eyes. If you do, you will create for yourself a huge form or an incalculable magnitude which (like the light which you see with your bodily eyes) extends in every direction. Your imagination lets it fill realm after realm of space, all the vastness you can conceive of. Or maybe you picture for yourself a venerable-looking old man. Do not imagine any of these things. If you would see God, here is what you should imagine: God is love“
If you begin personifying everything, if you represent spiritual/invisible concepts in concrete, human terms, if you reduce transcendent concepts to the pragmatic and the visible product of a sculptor's hands, people can get really confused. I promise.
People can lose sight of that transcendence and eternal meaning behind the symbols. They can get really wrapped up in the physical manifestations. This is also the central problem with the autism spectrum and such.
Aniconism attempts to free the mind from these limiting images. If you're Muslim and you contemplate a building with nothing but artistic words and text scrawled all over it, you obtain a far different result than contemplating a richly symbolic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Many people have the intellect and the insight to go beyond that concrete imagery, but not all.
But other people certainly do. And it is not just pictures, the lords prayer literally starts with "Our Father in heaven.."
Yep. It however does not say "Our Father in sky". In English you literally have that distinction.
