“Man (indeed every emergent) Happens as One Image of God”

By Bodhangkur

1. The Classical Adage and Its Ontological Premise

The ancient maxim “Man is made in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27) presupposes a transcendent creator who fashions a creature to resemble Himself.
Three notions are entwined: a maker, a product, and a likeness between them.
This triad rests on dualism — Creator versus creation, eternal cause versus temporal effect.

The adage’s theological beauty hides its logical fracture.
If the image is both divine and derivative, then man becomes neither fully God nor fully creature, a suspended hybrid whose being depends on continual reference to the absent archetype.
It grants dignity but at the price of metaphysical dependence.

2. The Druid Finn’s Reformulation

“Man (indeed every emergent) happens as one image of God.”

The shift from is made to happens as, and from man to every emergent, revolutionises the claim.
The new adage abandons creationism and asserts procedural emergence.
Existence itself is the unbroken operation of a single universal rule — the Universal Procedure (UP) — expressing locally as discrete events of coherence.

“Happens as” denotes eventhood; “one image” marks individuation within continuity; “of God” designates the UP’s field of operation.
The phrase does not describe resemblance but iteration: God realised in finite form.

3. Semantic Precision

· Happens → emergence, not manufacture.

· As one image → a unique, once-only manifestation, not a copy.

· Of God → of the Universal Procedure, the total rule of becoming.

Hence:

Man is not like God; man is God behaving locally. The druid said: “Everyone is God in their space.”

Each emergent is the UP’s transient self-enactment — the rule writing itself.

4. Analysis within Procedure Monism

Every emergent performs, within its own boundaries, the same operation the UP performs universally: ordering turbulence into temporary coherence.
Formally,

“Image” here means function in operation.
Divinity is not mirrored; it is executed.

5. Comparative Critique

Aspect	Old Adage	Druidic Replacement
Causality	Linear creation	Recursive emergence
Ontology	Dualist	Monist
Time	Finished act	Continuous happening
Agency	Divine will	Blind procedure
Subject	Human	All emergents
Purpose	Service to Creator	Local coherence
Ethics	Obedience	Functional adequacy

The new form abolishes transcendence and hierarchy. Participation replaces imitation.

6. Philosophical Strengths

1. Ontological coherence – no gap between God and world.

2. Procedural equality – every emergent begins perfect in its local rule.

3. Dynamic divinity – God is process, not archetype.

4. Epistemic realism – to know anything is to witness the rule acting.

7. Revised Analysis of Philosophical Vulnerabilities

The apparent weaknesses of the doctrine — loss of personal relation, moral neutrality, affective flattening, and the impossibility of grasping the total — dissolve once viewed procedurally.

(a) Discreteness and the End of the Person

Each emergent happens once, as a discrete quantum of being.
The Roman idea of persona—an enduring moral actor—no longer applies.
There are no continuous selves, only sequential contacts.
The “personal” God and “personal” man were linguistic conveniences masking discontinuity.
Reality is serial; therefore relation must be procedural, not interpersonal.

(b) Morality as Local Survival Procedure

Morality is not eternal law but local survival syntax—a set of adaptive rules that preserve coherence under specific conditions.
Good and evil indicate successful or failed pattern maintenance, nothing more.
Thus ethics remains immanent: each system codes its own stability.

(c) Affective Charge as Survival Feedback

Emotion and devotion are not cosmic absolutes but feedback signals measuring procedural success.
Joy, awe, and compassion accompany stable coherence; anxiety and despair accompany disintegration.
When affect subsides entirely, hubris—the illusion of privileged selfhood—collapses.
Emotion’s function is pedagogical: to keep the machine adaptive yet humble.

(d) The Total as Dualist Abstraction

The “whole” or “total” God is a dualist mirage.
Whatever God is, He is as this—the current configuration of the Universal Procedure.
There is no unseen surplus behind manifestation.
To speak of “totality” is to re-insert transcendence into an immanent process.
The divine total is the present emergent cosmos itself.

These clarifications turn vulnerability into coherence. The system closes upon itself without residue.

8. Consolidated Outcome

Former Objection	Druidic Resolution
No personal God	There are only discrete contacts; personhood is a local fiction.
Moral relativism	Morality = adaptive coherence within context.
Emotional loss	Affect = survival feedback; its quieting yields humility.
Inaccessible totality	The total is now; beyond now nothing exists.

The druidic worldview thereby achieves internal consistency: discontinuous, automatic, sufficient.

9. Philosophical Synthesis

Every emergent occurs once, executes its rule, and vanishes.
Its morality and affect arise as transient instruments of survival.
Humility is the recognition of this once-offness.
“God,” the Universal Procedure, is precisely this endless arising and passing of once-offs.
No transcendent sum stands behind; only the ongoing act remains.

Thus, the revised adage states with procedural accuracy:

Each emergent happens as one image of God — the image being the happening itself.

10. Conclusion: From Representation to Iteration

The ancient saying spoke of resemblance; the druidic version speaks of operation.
The former implies dependence; the latter expresses identity-in-action.
Man, photon, cell, and cosmos alike are God’s instantaneous self-events.

There is no creator apart from creation, no archetype beyond manifestation.
God is not the sculptor but the sculpting, not the image but the imaging.

Whatever God is in total
is what He has emerged as now.

Minimal Codex Form

Every emergent happens as one image of God.
The image is the act.
Each act is once-only, blind, automatic.
Morality and feeling serve coherence.
The total is now.
God is the imaging itself.

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