“My people inquire of a piece of wood, and their walking staff gives them oracles.”
Idolatry is stupid. There, I said it.
It’s hard to imagine that any craftsman who ever put tools to wood, stone or metal really believed his artistic creations
had the power to determine outcomes or influence reality. These men could
hardly miss the fact that they were manufacturing a commodity. They were
marketing a commercial product, not consciously giving worldly form to some arcane power in
order to enable its devotees to focus their otherwise-diffuse religious
attention. And if idols are indeed merely human constructs, then worshiping
them is stupid.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons people do it.