Peter wrote

Peter, where does the Bible define this as a matter of individual rights? The passage you mentioned nowhere mentions the concept of individual rights. How does the Bible define the concept of individual rights? Why didn't Jesus speak of individual rights, such as the right not to be enslaved? Jesus nowhere speaks against the practice of owning slaves, but it seems that this would be an issue of top priority on Jesus' list of moral issues if he were an advocate of individual rights. If we were to look in the Bible for a clear, explicit and fully developed theory of individual rights, which book(s) in the Bible do you think we should consult? It seems to me that you are inserting the concept of individual rights, a modern concept, into your interpretation of the passage you quoted (Genesis 1:27), which nowhere says anything about the concept of individual rights. And if the Bible gives us the key to individual rights, why did it take almost 1700 years for the first nation built explicitly on man's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happines to come into existence, particularly in light of the fact that, when Christianity was the dominant philosophy in Europe since the Dark Ages, governments which identified and protected individual rights did not emerge? Indeed, a rights-based government did not emerge until religion was on the retreat from the advent of science and the Age of Reason (an age when "faith" was exposed to be the fraud that it is). I think each of these questions need to be addressed if one wants to claim that "rights are god-given."

Furthermore, I wonder how the concept of individual rights can be rationally integrated into the rest of the Bible. For instance, does biblegod observe and honor an individual's rights? I don't think the Egyptians who lost their first born in Exodus 12:29 would think so, and I would find myself in agreement with them. Apologists will say that "God has creator's rights, and thus has the right to take away someone's rights." This simply means that rights are a matter of whim, not of reason, since biblegod could revoke someone's rights simply because he got pissed off. Hardly a sound basis for a rational theory of individual rights.

Peter mentions "the image of God." What exactly is this referring to? God is said to be non-corporeal, i.e., he has no body. So any supposed "image of God" could not be an image of a physical form, could it? Is "image of God" supposed to be a reflection of God's intellect? How could it be? God is supposed to be both omniscient and infallible, but man is neither of these. So it is hard to see how one could hold that the "image of God" refers to God's intellect. Could "image of God" refer to his moral nature? I don't see how that could be, since Christians hold that God cannot sin while claiming that man cannot avoid sinning apart from the intervention of God through salvation (and some even dispute this). Either way, I don't see how one could hold that man is created in the moral "image of God." The only way I could see that "image of God" could apply is if this is taken to mean the emotional nature of God, for throughout the Bible God is portrayed as very emotional, usually in degrees of anger and rage. So, it seems that Christians think they were created in the image of anger and hatred, since biblegod frequently exhibits these emotions, and biblegod is said not to change (so he must always be one hellova pissed off dude).