Editor, Gazette-Journal:
It troubles me to read letters that seem bent on duping your readers. Or worse, outsmarting wise passages of Scripture.
Recently a letter (“Iconoclasts,” Feb. 22 Readers Write) purported to humiliate justly opponents of Confederate statues in public places. I won’t repeat its silly misunderstandings of its topic.
But I will note how central iconoclasm has proved in our human religious and secular progress of becoming wiser, kinder, more generous and more sociable thinkers, talkers and seekers of justice.
Deuteronomy 5 introduces one of humanity’s sharpest condemnations of icons, or idolatry, the fetishization of unholy images in place of worshipping the God of Judeo-Christianity:
“You shall have no gods but me.
“You shall not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in heaven above or on earth beneath … you shall not bow down to them or serve them.”
Martin Luther, 3,000 years after Moses, was another great iconoclast. He opposed Catholic indulge...