Religion means to love God, and that means you must know who God is. There is no alternative. You must know the person who is God. Then you can have loving exchanges with Him. That we are teaching. We are asking our disciples to rise early in the morning and offer mangala arati, then bhoga arati, to the Lord in His form as the Deity in the temple. Are we such fools and rascals that we are wasting time worshiping a “doll”? Sometimes people think like that. But that is not a fact. When you enter the temple, you know definitely, “Here is Krsna. He is God, and we must love Him like this.” That is the superexcellence of this Krsna consciousness movement. We do everything definitely, on the positive platform.

From Civilization & Transendence, by Srila Prabhupada