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If We Are Made In God's Image...

If we are made in the image and likeness of God, and we treat everything in existence as beneath us, why would we expect that God, who we think is so much greater than we are, would not necessarily treat us the same way we treat our environment, other animals, or even each other?

While we feel perfectly justified in killing plants (which it turns out may have some level of awareness similar to our own, however different), and animals (which the works of E. O. Wilson and Franz de Waal and others are only steadily demonstrating are far more intelligent that we have previously thought), and even "heretics" and "Jews" and "niggers" and "fags" (and, well, you get the point), we nevertheless are quite convinced that God is somehow above all of this, at least when it comes to ourselves, even though we are often doing all of such killing primarily because we think we are made in the image and likeness of a God, whose moral laws we feel obligated by our "faith" to kill and die for.

I suppose to "be like God," who gives us the gift of life only to take it away, we must be willing to do the same thing. But since we have had such difficulty imitating God in the one, we instead focus on doing our bloody best at surpassing him in the other.

 


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