There’s an iconic scene in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones is deep in Amazonia searching for the sacred relic of a South American tribe. It is a small, gold idol – the representation of an ancient peoples’ deity, perhaps.
I recall trips that Susan and I took to Mexico City, and later to Merida and Oaxaca, where we saw the giant statue of Tlaloc, the Aztec God of Rain, and Chac, the Mayan God of Rain. There were also the heads of the plumed serpent god, Kukulkan. All of these were pre-Columbian artifacts of peoples who had not yet been exposed to Christianity, the Bible, or any of the trappings of Old-World religions. I should mention too, that while I have never been to India or Nepal, I have a passing familiarity with Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha, Lakshmi, and Krishna – a few of the deities in the Hindu pantheon.
The 2nd and 3rd might refer to musical intervals, but here they do not. Rather, they refer to specific Commandments that Moses gave the children of Israel after presumably receiving them and eight others on Mt Horeb. The 2nd commands that the faithful not create idols – yet here in America many self-proclaimed followers of Christianity worship money and political power except perhaps on Sunday when they reach into their billfolds for money to contribute to their churches. The 3rd commands that the faithful not use the name of God foolishly or flippantly – yet here in America, the same aforementioned Christians claim that God sent Trump to them as their latter-day Savior. Trump, they claim, is The Messiah.
The most recent (and deranged) Trump campaign ad claims that God looked down on the wickedness of America in 1946 and decided to “send us Trump.” Good grief, how un-Judeo-Christian can a group of so-called Evangelical Christians get?
I have to say that think the First Peoples of the New World had it right. I’ll take a stone idol that is an abstract representation of the incomprehensible over Trump, who is evil incarnate, any day. If God did send us Trump, then it was, as the popular meme says, only because he had run out of locusts.