ABSTRACT
The status of images in the history of many religions and in modern media is an embattled one and generally for a single reason: images are thought to be untrustworthy-they lie, cheat, and steal. Whether in Socrates or in the many critiques of images mounted by Jewish, Muslim, or Christian writers, by Hindu reformers or by Marxist revolutionaries, suspicions circle around a tenacious distrust of images (Latour and Weibel 2002). Images lie inasmuch as they selectively tell the truth, exaggerating aspects of it, commonly distorting what they portray into whatever priests, tyrants, or vendors want pliant viewers to believe. Images dupe the unsuspecting, lulling them into views or opinions that are untrue, cheating viewers of access to truth or power. And images steal belief from words, the revealed medium of divine self-revelation in the so-called religions of the book. As Socrates might have put it, images rob belief in the logical procedure of discourse-the progressive movement of intellectual inquiry from opinion to truth, cheating reason of its rightful place in ascertaining the truth of a matter.
