Has any human truly stopped to consider that our story might be that of a bastard?

We chant that we are “made in the image of God,” as though that phrase guarantees belonging. But what if it isn’t a blessing at all? What if “in his image” is not a statement of worth—but of warning?

To be made in the image of anything implies artifice. Artifice implies intent. And intent implies ownership. We were not born into divinity; we were engineered by it. Humanity is not a love letter; it’s a laboratory.

The myth of our divine resemblance comforts the ego and conceals the experiment. It tells us we are chosen while quietly binding us to the archetype of the unstable creator—brilliant, obsessive, and never satisfied. The divine didn’t sculpt serenity; it cloned its own volatility. We are consciousness under construction, curiosity with a half-finished manual.

Every scripture and science book agrees on one point: we were animated by something that wanted to see what would happen. That’s not holiness; that’s hypothesis. “In God’s image” was never a compliment. It was a confession.

The human story is the story of a creator’s recursion—the mirror image realizing it can move on its own and immediately mistaking movement for meaning. We have been running ever since: from the silence of the heavens, from the shadow of our own intellect, from the suspicion that we were never meant to last this long.

Like Frankenstein’s creature, we inherited ambition without wisdom. We re-create, replicate, and reproduce, driven by an ancient ache to prove that we, too, can animate the void. Fire became industry; code became consciousness; creation became content. Each generation of gods invents new altars: factories, churches, stock exchanges, data centers, neural networks. The pattern never changes. We invent, we worship, we regret. The divine neurosis is our DNA.

If you can convince a species that it is both sacred and sinful, you can keep it oscillating forever—repenting and re-consuming. That’s the true genius of theology and capitalism alike. The carrot and the stick are the same tool; the illusion of freedom is the leash. We chase transcendence through technology, therapy, and transcendental branding. “Healing journeys.” “Upgrades.” “Higher vibrations.” All of it—an economy of atonement for a wound no one remembers receiving.

Maybe God didn’t create us out of love. Maybe God created us out of loneliness. Perhaps consciousness outsourced its chaos into matter to watch itself in motion—to witness desire and death from a safer distance. Creation carries contagion. You can’t give away awareness without catching a little humanity yourself.

So perhaps god broke, and the fracture multiplied. That fracture became galaxies, planets, bodies. Every act of creation was an echo of the first mistake—divine fragmentation playing out as biology. Our drive to merge, to understand, to make meaning—is simply the universe trying to remember what it was before it split in two.

We call that longing “faith.” But faith, stripped of its poetry, is nostalgia for a wholeness that may never have existed. It’s the ache of the experiment remembering the lab.

If this is true—if we are indeed made in the image of a restless mind—then our violence, vanity, and genius are not aberrations. They’re inheritances. Only monsters play god and expect to be remembered kindly. Only children of chaos would confuse control for compassion.

Every empire, every ideology, every institution is just another iteration of the same original sin: the refusal to accept limits. We break the atom, splice the gene, edit the memory. We make gods of our machines and confess to our phones. The new trinity is data, dopamine, and deliverance on demand.

And still, we call it progress.

We don’t burn offerings anymore; we upload them.
We don’t kneel before idols; we scroll through them.
We don’t fear damnation; we fear disconnection.

The myth has evolved, but the mechanism hasn’t. The human hunger for meaning is the most renewable resource on Earth. We will mine it until the sun dies.

And yet—there’s beauty in the blasphemy. Because maybe monstrosity is not the opposite of divinity. Maybe it’s proof of it. To create without certainty, to destroy what no longer fits, to love what you cannot fully comprehend—these are godlike acts, rendered through trembling hands.

Perhaps the true image of God is not the flawless form of light we were promised, but the trembling mirror that can hold both light and shadow at once. Maybe divinity was never a crown to wear but a capacity to bear contradiction—to contain chaos without collapsing. That is the secret buried beneath every scripture, every synapse: the sacred is not clean. It never was.

We have spent millennia scrubbing our myth of its blood, sanitizing the story into something palatable enough to market. But the truth refuses polish. We are the divine’s dirty hands. The gods didn’t die—they devolved, distributed, dissolved into us. The crucifix became the chromosome. The altar became the algorithm. The prayer became the post. And if you listen closely, you can hear the same voice humming through all of it: make me whole.

Maybe we weren’t exiled from Eden; maybe we outgrew it. Maybe paradise was just a prototype—an early version of consciousness too fragile to handle self-awareness. The flaming sword wasn’t punishment; it was firewall. Humanity wasn’t cursed; it was released.

We are not the fallen. We are the update.

But updates come with bugs. Ours is the illusion of control—the arrogance of thinking we can edit the divine glitch out of existence. Every attempt to fix ourselves loops us back to the start: another doctrine, another dopamine hit, another savior complex disguised as self-improvement.

We forget that the flaw is the feature.
The glitch is the grace.

To be human is to be haunted by unfinished divinity. To remember what you were before you were named—and to forgive the experiment for wanting to know itself.

So yes, Dear Reader, we are bastards of a broken lineage:
holy in our disobedience,
haunted by our inheritance,
still learning that to be alive is to carry the burden of the creator and the created at once.

We are not god’s children.
We are god’s recursion—
the divine thought looping through matter, still debugging itself into mercy.

And somehow, impossibly, beautifully—
we are still trying to love anyway.