“… in his own image.”

It's said in one of the great religious books that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.”

But isn't it truer to say that man created his gods in his own image? In the image of man created he his gods?

From Yahweh to Wotan and from Zeus to Zoroaster, the virtues, vices and behaviour of the gods man has written about -- written about in stories from Genesis to The Lay of Alviss --- are those of man himself.  But they're of man himself writ large. His gods have super-human jealousies; super-human anger; super-human lusts. They’re not just powerful, they’re all-powerful; they’re not just knowing, they’re all-knowing; they’re not just present, they’re present everywhere and at once – they’re omniscient, omnipotent and omni-present you see, and they’re all these three things (usually) because the men and women who’ve written the stories about their gods have simply taken human qualities and made them more so.

Fact is, the reason man “knows” his gods and their attributes is not because his gods have revealed themselves or because his gods have a specific nature, but because man himself has revealed them in the stories and songs and poems he’s created about them in order to help explain his primitive world, and to have stories to tell at night around his fire. He’s created them in his own image, with his own strengths and weaknesses, just more so.

Fact is, the stories man tells about his gods tell more about man than they do about the gods, since the gods they talk about never have existed. The great religious books and stories of history are a pre-philosophic, pre-scientific way by which primitive men attempted “to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values” – to give his world meaning in stories entertaining enough to be told and retold.

On the first day man discovered his world.

On the second day he created his gods to explain it.

And on the third day, he came to understood he needed better explanations, and better understanding of his world if he was to truly explain it.  It was not enough to say that God created the world, since if that were true then who created God?

But the answer to that one is simple. 

Who created God? We did. That should been always clear.

Who “created” existence? No one; existence was always there. Our gods were just our first primitive way of explaining that to ourselves.

Which means the Divine Spark in Michelangelo’s famous painting goes precisely the opposite way it’s normally understood.