MAN/WOMAN AS IMAGE OF GOD - WHY THIS IS NOT THE HONOUR IT SEEMS TO BE

The Bible says that we are made in the pattern of Adam and Eve, in the image of God. God reflects us and we reflect him.  Christianity says you are not just an animal.  Something has been added to you so you need God.

The us as image of God notion says that if we do certain things to ourselves then that is a direct violation of him. He has copyrighted us. If I copyright my photo and somebody tears it up in front of me that is like what we are doing to God.  The Church bases its ideas of human dignity on us being made by God and designed by God.  The idea that God wants us to have body autonomy and shape our bodies into cats if it makes us happy or makes us feel more authentic to ourselves renders this notion meaningless.  An image of God that can mean anything is useless.  But if we are not made in the image of God or if our choice is what matters not his then religion and God belief are oppressing millions.  If you don't feel oppressed they are still potentially oppressing you.  It is oppression to run after what is not oppressing you for it can't find a way how to.

Genesis teaches God made us male and female in his own image.  Read Genesis 1:26-27.  There it says let us make mankind in our image and in our likeness that they may rule so God made mankind is his own likeness and in his image he made them and male and female he created them.  This text is saying something different from Eve being made in God's image.  And Adam being made in the divine image.  Here, TOGETHER they are God's image.  Marriage is declared to show man and woman both are in the image of God.  That is one reason for the poetic way here how God is referred to at the start as not he but we. 

Some trying to read what we now know of gender not being the same as sex try to read it back into the text.  They chant, "Genesis uses a merismos.  This is a device in scripture and other texts where you get the impression they are only describing two different things when they are in fact describing them and all in between.  You will be told God made night and day meaning them and everything in between."  But this assumes that man and woman in the Bible are just a merismos.  This is not as obvious as night and day is.  If you think of Adam and Eve as very like apes what happens then?  And what of Jesus having said a man must stay with his wife for marital sex is body fits body and becoming one flesh?  A man who is not truly a man but a woman cannot be asked to do that.  If you marry somebody who does not know who they are and that is revealed in time then the marriage should perhaps end.

Jesus spoke of himself as God's image and referred to that teaching to ban divorce.

Jesus regarded Genesis as having full authority and referred to it to defend the idea of man being man and woman being woman and so the two bodies are meant to fit together in marriage for life and divorce is impossible in the eyes of God.     The same material in Genesis says God made man in his own image and likeness and in the image of his own self he made them male and female.  So the idea of man and woman as expressions of one God implies they picture God and this is his plan.  They are to unite to show the picture.  Now to say he made them in HIS image when they are male and female implies that woman is nothing in herself and what matters is that she complements man.  She is the same sex as him but an inferior model.  Her body exists for his penetration and invasion and she must serve by his side - no wonder Eve was made from Adam's rib.

Genesis has God using "we" but nevertheless stresses God's unity and oneness.  The idea is that all of man and all of woman pictures and reflects God.  Take sex characteristics.  For a woman to change her body to become like a man is a sin.  For a man to change his body to become like a woman is a sin.  In those days, male transgenders would have been castrated in many cases.  All that is condemned.  The implication is that you should be at peace with your body for all of it is from God and the picture he has made of himself.  This attacks the experience of gender or sex dysphoria.  Today, we rightly see such teachings as hateful and bigoted.

So it is said that God made man in his own image and male and female created he them.  As Genesis says God has no rivals and is one it is believed the image of God is shown mainly in how human nature is a unity.  The entire human being is the image of God.  As human is man and woman there is a hint here of how male and female bodies fit with penis and vagina.

We read that Adam had a son after his own image and likeness.  Some compare this to God making Adam in his image.  But the wording being similar does not mean that its the same thing.  Genesis is clear that Adam had no father. Thinking the text is saying God has a male body is going too far.

Religion tells us your dignity is based on you being made by God in his image. If God did not make you and if you are not in his image or this image is too vague to mean much or to to be of any clear use the implication is that you have no dignity. Instead of just seeing you have dignity religion needs to come up with a theory to base it on. It is artifice. It is artificial. It is shallow. It is about seeing you not as you but through a religious prism. The major basic question we have is what consciousness is. The God idea tells us nothing at all about that. 

So far we see that the Bible does not dignify woman as woman but only in relation to men and in relation to a God who prefers he/pronouns and to be a picture of manhood.  It does not matter if God is not literally male.  In fact his wanting to be pictured as male is what matters and is the problem.  Get it!  Genesis says that God, HE, created man and woman in HIS likeness.  What an extraordinary use of pronouns!  What would it mean to say a woman is in a male identified image?  She is to be the mirror of man that he can enjoy his vanity with.  It is like how Paul wrote that man is the direct image of God and woman is the image of man who is the image of God.  She is the image indirectly.  This unpacks the male and female structure and nothing else is allowed.  It is patriarchy.

Though the Bible at its very start says all men and all women are in the image of God - God is in them so we learn what he is like from learning about people, Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament as the word or image of God. The evil thing about that is that it implies he is the only image of God you need. It totally makes the image of God doctrine obsolete or if not obsolete impractical. If Jesus was a fraud then we must not lose sight of how cruel that fraud is. And what if that fraud was aided by evil spirits?

Christians claim that there is more dignity if you are made for God than if you are made for an ignoble thing such as yourself so those who say we must love people not God or more than God are wrong (Radio Replies, Vol 3, Question 1001). In other words, you don’t have any dignity of your own at all. You need to believe in God to get dignity. The Christians are saying, "You are rubbish. You have no dignity. God made you for himself and God is good. Therefore this gives you dignity." That is a complete contradiction.

To say that God gives dignity is a lie because he is only believed in. It is belief in God that gives the dignity. And it is artificial dignity for nothing can give you true dignity if you are not entitled to it. If you need belief to give yourself dignity then you have not got the dignity at all. You are only trying to rationalise your dignity into existence. You have as much dignity as the pauper who thinks he is the emperor of the world enrobed in majesty and glory.

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.

The doctrine of God is about giving artificial dignity. The real thing is much better.  If you have the dignity to create devotion to God based on you creating belief then you don't need that belief to give you dignity for you must already have it anyway in the first place.

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