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“God is a perfect being that we are trying to be like.” - Plato
“No matter how good you are, you will never be as perfect as God.” – St. Paul

“Imagio Dei” is the expression used to refer to the ideology that believes in humans being like God in one or various different ways. It originated from the piece of text in Genesis 1:27: "God created man in his own image..." which describes the situation of Creation in the beginning of the world and all living things – specifically when the Creator made the first member of the human kind; Adam. The passage tells us that human is a living replica of our God and that we must bear that in mind during all that we do. The text in Genesis does not actually mean that God came into human form or that we would be physical copies of a spiritual being (because we all have different physiques), but that mankind portrays God in its various ways of intellectual, spiritual and moral behaviour.

The concept of “Imagio Dei” suggests that people would be the closest to God from all other living things, thus making the humankind different from all other life forms and thus giving human kind an intellectual way of arranging affairs. This freedom makes it possible for us to have a Greater Meaning in Life (existential purpose) and gives us the possibility of taking chords into our own hands.

Humans have an ability to think rationally and connect causes to consequences (from there comes the concept of morality and manners, which so far seems to be a human-only privilege), have skills of concentration (zooming into one subject as a time and maintaining that for as long as we want to without natural instincts kicking in) and freedom of creativity (imagination, the skill to think above reality and to bring these thoughts to others by communication, art, music or literature); self-conscience (we are aware of ourselves, the future and the past); and the possibility of expanding one’s information...