CAnnoneer, you keep talking about God creating things as a by-product or excrement, or without intent. Also, this quotation:
What if life as we know it is just an unintended or unimportant by-product?
If you believed in such a fumbling God, you might be right. I was talking about a much more competent diety.
If A and B are similar, it seems facetious to say that "A is similar to B" is wrong but "B is similar to A" is right.
But we're not talking about mere similarity. We're talking about degrees of similarity. Gods who struggle for power, betray and kill one another, and back differing factions of humankind against one another, are simply human beings writ large.
"Dei-morphic", "aquarium"... I see pride, admittedly a deadly sin.
Is this the old argument that the Biblical teaching about being made in God's image is arrogant? It assumes that the "image-bearing" is not true, and is simply something that religious people want to believe. It is an unwarranted assumption. After all, we could be right about God making us in His image. To the Christian, particularly, it doesn't grant much room for arrogance, considering our belief that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." We are like Him in some respects, yes, but we are also hopeless rebels against that God-likeness, bound for Hell.