Were we created in the image of God?

This week's AiG newsletter talks about angels, something I don't care too much about, but I'd like to highlight a few things I find interesting.

Mankind has a unique spiritual aspect, and this spirit is uniquely made in the image of God. We should expect this image to have certain aspects of God’s characteristics since God is spirit (John 4:24).

The word "spirit" or "spiritual" is meaningless. What is a spirit and what makes someone spiritual? It's a vague and vacuous concept used by people of all religions (and even non-religions) and it never means the same thing to two different people. How does it help me to realize that God is spirit? Does that just mean that he isn't physical? I can think of a lot of things that aren't physical but don't fall under most peoples' definitions of spiritual - math, anger, logical absolutes, etc. Does it describe those things that have life? Does that mean that animals and plants are spiritual as well? In most cases I think it's just synonymous with "religious."

Often Christians describe the image of God as superior intellectual ability, such as reason and abstract thought, worship of God, language and communication with God, ability to make decisions, creative expression, immortality, emotions such as love, sadness, anger, and so on. These attributes show how separate man is from beasts and other physical entities...

That's funny, because animals are capable of most things on that list. Many animals can reason (at least rudimentarily), communicate with each other (through what some would call languages), make decisions (part of reasoning), creatively express themselves, and contain various emotions like the ones mentioned. The only attributes I can see non-human animals having is the ability to worship gods (and in that aspect, perhaps they are better off) and abstract thought (though it'd be tough to know if extremely intelligent animals such as dolphins are capable of this). And the jury is still out on immortality.

I suppose the moral of the story is this: contrary to what the creationists would like to believe, we're just not that much different from the rest of the animals. We're just a bit smarter and better suited for general purposes. If I was created specially by a god, I would expect nothing less than the ability to shoot lasers out of my eyes.