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"Idolatry"
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Transhumanism, Religion, and Techno-Idolatry: A Derridean Response to Tirosh-Samuelson
This paper critiques Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s view of transhumanism as techno-idolatry by applying Derrida’s notion of the unconditional “to-come” and the generalized fetish. While acknowledging Tirosh-Samuelson’s stance that fetishes should not be reduced to idols, I argue that she fails to extend this understanding to transhumanism, instead depicting its fetishes as fixed idols. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of the generalized fetish, I argue that religious objects in Judaism (like the shofar or tefillin) function not as objects of worship but as material mediators of divine relation—tangible signs that carry symbolic, spiritual, and covenantal meaning while gesturing toward the divine without claiming to contain or represent it. Similarly, in transhumanism, brain-computer interfaces and AI act as fetishes that extend human capability and potential while remaining open to future reinterpretation. These fetishes, reflecting Derrida’s idea of the unconditional “to-come,” resist closure and allow for ongoing change and reinterpretation. By reducing transhumanism to mere idolatry, Tirosh-Samuelson overlooks how technological fetishes function as dynamic supplements, open to future possibilities and ongoing reinterpretation, which can be both beneficial and harmful to humanity now and in the future.
Journal Article
E xhuming the N ahualli : Shapeshifting, Idolatry, and Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico
This article examines the relationship between ritual specialists, nanahualtin or nahualistas (pl.) and nahualli or nahual (sing.), and healing practices, adding context to the social roles they fulfilled and the range of feats they performed. The cases examined here reveal that nanahualtin operated as intellectuals in their communities because of their ability to control animals, prognosticate, and heal or harm individuals at will. Some nanahualtin shapeshifted from humans to animals while others possessed animal companions. The elevated status of nanahualtin led commoners to seek their advice, which conflicted with the established orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Because clergymen championed the sacraments as the best way to access the divine, non-orthodox rituals performed in mountains, rivers, and caves were derided as idolatrous devil worship. The 11 criminal and Mexican Inquisition cases examined here range from 1599 to 1801. Two seventeenth-century cases (1678 and 1685) and one eighteenth-century case (1701) contain Nahuatl phrases and testimonies from Chiapas and Tlaxcala, respectively. The cases from Chiapas demonstrate the use of Nahuatl as a vehicular language outside the central valley of Mexico. This article examines the gender of the animals into which ritual specialists transformed as an emergent category from trial records, which provides insight into Catholic officials’ understanding of the nahualli. Last, this study notes social divisions between rural and urban clergy regarding the power of nanahualtin and the efficacy of their magic.
Journal Article
Idolatry and Relation
In a brief passage from the third part of Ich und Du , Buber expounds his conception of idolatry as an objectifying disposition that contradicts the relational nature of an authentic religious act. I will show that the main categories of Buber's thought – that is, the Grundworte ‘ ich-du ’ and ‘ ich-es ’ – provide the theoretical coordinates through which Buber understands the antithesis between authentic religion and idolatry as one between relationality and its opposite.
Journal Article
Gods and Idols. Representations and Symbolizations of the Divinity in Religions of Ancient Israel. Aniconism – The Non-figural Presence (IIb/1)
The following article represents the former section of a larger study regarding religious aniconism practiced in Ancient Israel. The aniconic movement is an alternative to the iconographic expression of divinity. Aniconism understands the configuration of the divine in a symbolic and abstract way, apart from the anthropomorphic and the theriomorphic representation. In this sense, the props used were stone and wood, especially unwrought, in their crude form, so that later, thanks to his insatiable aesthetic appetite, man could manufacture finished pillars, ornate columns, seals, chariots, thrones, obelisks, temples and pyramids, sacralized empty spaces.The aniconist movement is found throughout the Near East, mostly in Phoenicia and Syria, but aniconic artifacts are also found in Ancient Palestine too, according to archaeological findings. Thus, the history of Ancient Israel does not strike a discordant note in this cultural-religious course, on the contrary, although the official post-exilic propaganda was as prohibitive as possible towards these manifestations, considering them alien and idolatrous.
Journal Article
Gods and Idols. Representations and Symbolizations of the Divinity in the Religions of Ancient Israel (IIa). Idolatry and Iconoclasm
This article represents the first section of the second part of the study Gods and Idols. Representations and Symbolizations of the Divinity in the Religions of Ancient Israel. The subjects addressed for analysis are idolatry and iconoclasm in the context of Levantine iconography, seen from the perspective of the biblical authors, a totally tendentious, aggressive and contrary vision, in particular, to the archaeological discoveries. The Hebrew lexical fund of the MT was very rich and, later, almost doubled by the Greek version of the Old Testament text translated into the LXX (Septuagint) translation, regarding the denomination of foreign gods, idols and other representations. However, the “de facto tradition” of the Israelites contained a plastic iconography, idolatry and iconoclasm being phenomena that appeared in the post-exile period and called by scientific research “programmatic tradition”.
Journal Article
How the idea of religious toleration came to the West
Religious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe.
Perez Zagorin takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy. This position had its roots in certain intellectual and religious traditions, which Zagorin traces before showing how out of the same traditions came the beginnings of pluralism in the West. Here we see how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers--writing from religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives--contributed far more than did political expediency or the growth of religious skepticism to advance the cause of toleration. Reading these thinkers--from Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to John Milton and John Locke, among others--Zagorin brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern for the spiritual welfare of religion itself weighed more in the defense of toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments. His book--which ranges from England through the Netherlands, the post-1685 Huguenot Diaspora, and the American Colonies--also exposes a close connection between toleration and religious freedom.
A far-reaching and incisive discussion of the major writers, thinkers, and controversies responsible for the emergence of religious tolerance in Western society--from the Enlightenment through the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights--this original and richly nuanced work constitutes an essential chapter in the intellectual history of the modern world.
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