Image of God does not Ground Human Rights

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@Patrick

Now, turning it around, I find it curious that:

1. The Image of God is used as the grounding for rights by Christians: Disability and the Image of God

2. But they can’t even agree on what said Image of God is: Must a Genealogical Adam be a Sequential Genesis Reading?

I am really surprised that Neanderthals are deigned the “image of God” designation. They are existent. It is not like anyone has to give them any human rights or feed them or give them subsidizes. They are all gone. To say they were so close to human and then intermixed providing good genes and bad ones to almost everybody is kind of degrading. I can see how some can not want to call the Lucy Australopithecus “in the image of God” but the Neanderthals?

Some people would say they are in the Image of God. In many Genealogical Adam models, for example, we say that God made people in his Image long before Adam. That might have included Neanderthals and Denisovans.

I’m just saying that no one can even agree on what that is. It is not like we can do an experiment to tell us the answer, or read the answer out of the Bible. We are just not going to know.