A WARNING AGAINST THE DOCTRINE THAT YOU AND ME ARE ICONS OF GOD

The Bible speaks of Jesus as the revelation of who God is and what he wants us to be in human form.  He is the image and icon of God. Genesis says God made man and woman in his image, his likeness.  This notion seems to lend us dignity for it says each human being tells us something about God and is God reaching out to us.

As Genesis after saying that man and woman image God, says they are to have dominion over the animals and all creation, it is clear that God has given them the authority to be him.  It is like what a saint said, "God has no hands on earth but yours."  The image thing then is degrading for it is too much about power.  And we know from science that the animals downgraded by this teaching of human superiority have rights too. They are not walking blobs of flesh.

The man and woman are treated as a complimentary ruling unit.  God did not give authority to man and then to woman.  They got it as a pair.  The message is that every man needs woman and every woman needs man.  That is why Paul in the New Testament says you cannot put one without the other.

The faith says that God did not have to make any person but he did.  It says he makes us for himself.

Why is it dignified if God makes us for himself? Is it because he is so perfectly good and deserves people who live only to serve him? Then it must be less dignified or undignified then give yourself to another human being in a loving relationship for human beings are imperfect. It’s degrading.

Is it dignified if God makes us for himself because he makes us so happy in Heaven? Yet God is the one that said there is more dignity in loving enemies and the poor than your family or the rich.

The Christians reject the notion of a God who makes me for my own sake and not his. You cannot relate to a parent who only has you for their own sake. A real parent has children for the children's own sake.  Even if the children will kill you and you know it you still have them.  God is not a parent when he cannot take such a risk for he cannot be killed.  He has no vulnerability. 

The doctrine that there is more dignity in being made for God than for people or yourself shows clear and badly hidden contempt for people.

If this contempt is right, and the God belief inescapably implies that it is, then we have no dignity. Is it a solution to pretend that God gives us dignity when we have none? Of course it isn’t. God would be wrong to pretend we have dignity. He’d be a liar and how can a being you accuse of being untrustworthy give dignity? If we have dignity we don’t need God. Wouldn’t it make more sense to hold that as weak and fallible as we are, that we would love to fill the universe with joy if we got the real chance so our dignity is infinite? Human evil is a sickness in which evil is misperceived as good not a moral flaw. You cannot believe in evil unless you believe that it by definition mars our dignity. Believers could still be wrong about God – belief means you are not beyond the possibility that you are wrong in what you believe. From this it follows, that human feelings about God and ideas are what gives dignity. Man gives dignity then if you need to believe in God to believe in dignity. If man can do that then why God in the first place? To say you need God to believe in dignity is to say that Atheists or those who have barely any faith are opponents or nearly opponents of right and wrong.

This teaching actually insinuates that the person who does not agree it and stay conscious of the teaching is not a truly good person. If you have values based on the wrong grounds then they are not moral values. They are just your values. If God is what gives moral values objectivity, then it follows I must remind myself of that every minute of every day for if I forget I end up doing right for the wrong reason. If I invent my morality I am not really a moral person for I do not care about true morality but about morality as I want it to be. Sinners have values in their own way that oppose God's. Our intuition tells us that it is better to have values that benefit others and get on with practicing them and to reject anything that insinuates that we need to know their basis before we can practice them in reality. In reality, it is the believer in God who is going about making morality seem objective and right in itself the wrong way, not the unbeliever. The believer is also a hypocrite if he says atheists can be moral people while refusing to ground morality and its objective nature in God. At most she can say the atheist is simulating morality. Also, the perception that it’s evil to torture a baby for fun is far more important than thinking there is probably a God (belief). It has more force than belief in God. To try to ground morality and its objective nature in something that is merely believed in is in fact prioritising the wrong thing. It’s therefore irrational.

It is a scandal how people are tricked into adoring the god of the Christians!

God cannot feel anything. He is a conscious being with the power to reason and to love and us having these powers means we are in his image too. Babies are conscious and that is all and yet they are supposed to be in the image of God! The doctrine implies that adults are more valuable than babies. Jesus was supposed to be the man who was the image of God more than all others for he was morally perfect like God. From this it follows that evil people and especially atheists are less the image of God than a holy Catholic priest. That is to say they are not as valuable as good-living believers for being the image of God is supposed to confer value (though there are plenty of other things about the God doctrine that imply that God opposes this value so the doctrine is wholly contradictory).

In spite of the degrading way the doctrine of God makes believers look down on themselves and others they boast that they are the image of God. God reputedly made Adam and Eve in his own likeness. However, this boast still manages to be degrading in so far as arrogance is degrading. Arrogance is degradation because it is not proper self-esteem but in its foolishness it shows a deprivation of it. Higher beings than us would be the image of God more than we would be and such beings could exist. We might only feel we have free will and not have it at all. We might be conscious and capable of good but so are animals and they are not regarded as made in the image of God in any form. We might have reason but computers can reason too. So to claim to be in the image of God then is to boast that you know you have free will like God, can reason of this free will. But you would need to be a psychic God yourself to know this so the arrogance is incredible.
 
To accuse humanity of not being as good as God whose goodness is immeasurable is such a serious slur that it is clear that you need proof for God’s existence and then his goodness before you can have the right to say it. If you believe in God you cannot consistently believe in the importance of the human being when you feel entitled to slander them for the sake of believing in God. Then it would make no sense to say that unbelievers should not be slaughtered for God is to come before human welfare. (No wonder believers in God have been behind an astonishing amount of bloodletting throughout the centuries! It is not surprising for the Catholic Jesus and his mother Mary are to blame for sort of starting the religion in the first place knowing how easily hypnotised human beings are and yet they are hailed as immaculate and free from every stain of sin and evil!). Doctrines like, “God wants you to be holy more than you want it for yourself”, in this light are shown to be heart-chilling not heart-warming. How Catholics are manipulated by the clergy!

Religionists say, "I am made in the image of God and my rights come from God for my dignity comes from God."  This is messing about with different words that mean the same thing in order to look profound.  The translation is, "Image of God means human dignity.  I have dignity because I have dignity.  I have dignity for I am made in the image of God."  That is obvious nonsense.  It is better to assume dignity is a brute fact that to resort to that lying illogical nonsense.  At least then you are TRYING to establish dignity not LYING to establish it.  Lying to establish it is in fact trying to take it away for you have the right to truth.

Jesus is declared to be the image of God in the New Testament in a way that emphasises the Genesis doctrine and represents it.  He is the text in human form, he is the Word of God.  This is a black mark on him.

Your devotion to God and your belief is made by you not him.  Its errors prove that. Did you believe God was set to give you the bike you prayed for?  What happened there?  What if you broke your arm on the first day?  If you need this to be able to give people dignity then that means you deep down don't think they have it.  So you need a crutch to construct a dignity for them.  If you would affirm human dignity if you believed in God or not, you don't need belief in God.

The doctrine of God is about giving artificial dignity. The real thing is much better. 

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