I found this question and answer on Yahoo. I also grew up Roman Catholic and I can remember the reverence we had for statues. When I was first born again, when it was only me, the Holy Spirit, and the Bible, I was convicted by God’s word and threw out all my statues. Praise God! Will I be lured back to using statues by a backslidden Protestant Church? No way!
QUESTION:
Would a nativity scene be idol worship?
ANSWER:
Yes- it would be – especially if it is worshiped -
“We would never do that, it is just a symbol” I hear people screaming-
well, I grew up Catholic and we had a nativity scene and we were expected to kiss the feet of the baby Jesus ( umm… worship of an inanimate object – and for those that did not read the whole story- Jesus is not a baby and no longer resides in the manger!)
It was complete sacrilege to play with the nativity set, do anything that might cause o piece of it to break, handle “baby Jesus” in any way that was considered disrespectful— all worship-
I was given a set when I moved into my own place- I knew there was a problem when I passed it and I had been convicted to get rid of it- I thought, I am just going to throw that out, then my first thought ( brought on by years of conditioning I am sure) was , “oh no, I can’t put ‘baby Jesus’ in the trash- I was immediately convicted, remembering the commands about graven images and those in the Bible that were attached to their inanimate objects- I immediately tossed the whole set-
I later discovered that that whole set-up along with just about everything attached to Christmas was pagan oriented anyway.
So, yep, you are right – graven image, false idol, pagan influenced!
Source: Yahoo
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