God's Image

The athiests or doubters would explain it with little challenge. How natural and expected, they'd say, that God's personality was described by the early Torah authors with so many attributes most familiar to human experience.

Beginning in Genesis, Yahweh is the sole Creator of the universe who also at times expresses great wrath, jealousy, vengeance, remarkably mortal qualities that, to many who strive to understand, are most puzzling as divinely shaped descriptors of an All-powerful and All-knowing God.

Scripture clearly confirms that we're made in God's image, yet we've also been vexxed with painful, immature, and negative characteristics. Folks of faith might say our God's image is now a distortion because of sinful behavior. Disobeying Yahweh is the beginning of sin, Scripture pointedly describes.

God had no mercy for Adam and Eve's mistake, no tolerant understanding. Cast out into suffering, they knew nothing of God's purported universal loving or forgiving grace. Yahweh is starkly described as being very, very angry with them, very critical, and instantly judging the fate of all creation.

So, the Torah's authors intentionally and unapologetically describe a furious, uncompromising God-parent who ultimately kills nearly all of earth's humans and creatures thru drowning, because they didn't follow the rules. The notion of being "made in God's" image has been debated as an idea or symbol since the earliest times of Biblical record. Would it not be assumed that God must have already had these most ungodly traits well before humans? How is this explained?

Some would suggest that a supreme and omnipotent Creator of all of existence being so much like lowly, fallen, sinful, and primitive humans, is at the least suspicious by association.

Some would suggest that the reality is actually a reverse of the Scripture.

Perhaps it's the obvious, pragmatic, and non-spiritual fact of civilization's history that wandering humankind created the comforting myth of God, painting that millennial image on distinctly mortal canvas, and with the most common hues, the primary colors of human emotion, fear, anger, and joy.