Iconoclast means someone who challenges traditional beliefs. The etymology is from the words eikon (image) and klastes (breaker). The word was coined to refer to religious folk who destroyed images that co-religionists had made of God.
Modern-day iconoclasm is what ROTB is about –
replacing monolithic, arcane notions of the divine
with what makes more sense.
Before I continue in that charge, let me give you some history.
Hezekiah is a noted Biblical iconoclast – ridding his world of pictorial representations of the divine.
If you read the Bible carefully, you will find that God “walked” in the garden (Gen. iii. 8); closed the ark door with “his hand”; “smells” sacrifices, “ate” with Abraham (Gen. xviii. 8); “wrote with a hand” upon the tables of stone (Ex. xxxi. 18), had a “back” seen by Moses, and more.
Iconoclasm changed in early 8th century Byzantium when the question became whether or not it is acceptable to have a pictorial representation of the God-the-son. By this time, no Muslim, Christian, or Jew was depicting “God-the-father.”
The idea is that if is it certain, it is limiting, and if it is limited, it is not God.
An extension of this is the notion that God has no name.
Anyone suggesting that there is a proper path to God,
does not worship the same notion of the divine that I do.
As Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “Truth is a pathless land.”
There’s no one, singular path to God!
As William Blake said, “Jesus Christ is the only true God, and so am I, and so are you.”
There is no notion of God that is more correct
than the one that you have – or are working on.
Let us love each other and each other’s notions of the divine.
Let us smash the false idols of certainty when it comes to the limitless.
Let us reclaim the word “God” for our notions of the divine.
Let us be modern-day iconoclasts.
Spiritual-religious advice: Claim God as our own, if only linguistically.
