I am ready to learn more. However, after reading your responses, if there is no mention of worshipping through statues or other deities, I will have to say that this practice and approach is man made and illogical. If there is an almighty creator, would he need the help of statues to hear us?
If I may offer a thought for you? I think your difficulty in understanding this is in how you imagine God to be. Bear with my thoughts here.
What exactly is an idol but an image of God. If you or I or anyone holds any sort of mental image of God, that too is not God. But that image serves a purpose for us. It is something we focus the mind upon in contemplating that which is wholly beyond form. We exist in form. We see the world in terms of duality (subject/object relationships). There is "me" and there is "you", "self" and "other". It is the same for us when we speak of or imagine with the mind, God. There is you here, and God there.
Even your saying above in asking this, "
If there is an almighty creator, would he need the help of statues to hear us?," reflects a mental image of God you have and hold to. It represents God as external to you and others. It is a dualistic representation. It is a mental concept you have and imagine to be God. And if this, or any other mental image of God you have is anything you name God, and there is no truth beyond that image itself, can't that be termed "idolatry", placing an image as God itself?
But the use of images, mental or physical representations, do in fact hold a useful, and positive role for us as humans in order to relate to that which is wholly transcendent, that which is beyond all duality, that which is nondual. It is in fact that through these images, these representations we either have in mental forms or physical forms, that we are able to transcend duality into the formless, or Emptiness, or Ground, and into the nondual, or formlessness in form.
What happens is that in meditation, in contemplation or mystical experience there is a union that occurs where through the mental form we become one with God, and then something happens, that God, or the formless merges into you and the image dissolves or disappears. Take a few minutes to digest what is being said in this explanation here:
"But this is not God as an ontological other, set apart from the cosmos, from humans, and from creation at large. Rather, it is God as an archetypal summit of one's own Consciousness. ... By visualizing that identification 'we actually do become the deity. The subject is identified with the object of faith. The worship, the worshiper, and the worshiped, those three are not separate'. At its peak, the soul becomes one, literally one, with the deity-form, with the dhyani-buddha, with (choose whatever term one prefers) God. One dissolves into Deity, as Deity - that Deity which, from the beginning, has been one's own Self or highest Archetype."
~Ken Wilber, Eye to Eye, pg. 85
Another quote that you may relate to more easily contains this in more poetic form by a Sufi mystic of the 9th century,
There are lights which ascend and lights which descend. The ascending lights are the lights of the heart; the descending lights are those of the Throne. The false self is the veil between the Throne and the heart. When this veil is torn, and a door opens in the heart, like springs towards like. Light ascends toward light and light descends upon light, and it is light upon light.
When each time the heart sighs for the throne the throne sighs for the heart, so they come to meet. Each time a light ascends from you, a light descends toward you. If their energies are equal, then they meet halfway. But when the substance of light has grown in you, then this makes up a whole in relation to what is in the same nature in Heaven. Then, it is the substance of light in Heaven that longs for you, and is drawn to your light, and it descends toward you. This is the secret of the mystical journey.
~9th Century Sufi mystic, Najim al-Din Hubra
Even these lights, which are common in mystical experience, are a form of the divine, or subtle energies our higher minds experience, as we move from the gross realm of physical form, through the higher realms of subtle forms, to the formless itself. Eventually, these too disappear.
There's something that Jesus said that relates, I believe. He said that true worshipers will worship in "spirit and in truth". That is what happens in mystical experience. You see beyond the concepts or images we have of God, whether mental or physical as they are both and all just forms, to where we "know" or directly experience the divine within us and in all things. And that "Truth", is itself not a proposition, not an idea or set of beliefs, but the nature or essence of all truths, or best said as Illumination.
If you, I, or anyone stops at the image, mental or material and imagines that is what God is and stops there, they are falling short of getting in touch with that which is beyond all forms.
So, in looking merely at the surfaces of forms, be mindful you aren't yourself reducing God to only an idol.
