Belief in God as body or as liable to suffer affection is worse than idolatry. For the idolater does not deny the existence of God; he merely makes the mistake of supposing that the image of his own construction resembles a being which mediates between him and God. And yet because this leads to erroneous belief on the part of the people, who are inclined to worship the image itself instead of God (for the people cannot discriminate between the outward act and its idea), the Bible punishes idolatry with death, and calls the idolater a man who angers God. How much more serious is the error of him who thinks God is body! He entertains an error regarding the nature of God directly, and surely causes the anger of God to burn. Habit and custom and the evidence of the literal understanding of the Biblical text are no more an excuse for this erroneous belief than they are for idolatry; for the idolater, too, has been brought up in his wrong ideas and is confirmed in them by some false notions. If a man is not himself able to reason out the truth, there is no excuse for his refusing to listen to one who has reasoned it out. A person is not an unbeliever for not being able to _prove_ the incorporeality of God. He _is_ an unbeliever if he thinks God is corporeal.[275] The expressions in the Bible which have led many to err so grievously in their conceptions of God are due to a desire on the part of their authors to show all people, the masses including women and children, that God exists and is possessed of all perfection, that he is existent, living, wise, powerful, and active. Hence it was necessary to speak of him as body, for this is the only thing that suggests real existence to the masses. It was necessary to endow him with motion, as this alone denotes life; to ascribe to him seeing, hearing, and so on, in order to indicate that he understands; to represent him as speaking, in order to show that he communicates with prophets, because to the minds of common people this is the only way in which ideas are communicated from one person to another. As we are active by our sense of touch, God, too, is described as doing. He is given a soul, to denote that he is alive. Then as all these activities are among us done by means of organs, these also are ascribed to God, as feet, hands, ear, eye, nose, mouth, tongue, voice, fingers, palm, arm. In other words, to show that God has all perfections, certain senses are ascribed to him; and to indicate these senses the respective organs are related to them, organs of motion to denote life, of sensation to denote understanding, of touch to denote activity, of speech to denote revelation. As a matter of fact, however, since all these organs and perceptions and powers in man and animals are due to imperfection and are for the purpose of satisfying various wants for the preservation of the individual or the species, and God has no wants of any kind, he has no such powers or organs.[276]