Jesus's Teachings Without His Identify? Patronizing Nonsense.

My answer to a question on Quora:

Is there a religion that only believes in Jesus, and not necessarily God? I believe in the things Jesus taught, but not that he would be the son of God. I don't believe in God in general, honestly.

One religion that allows belief in Jesus but not in God would be Atheism. Some atheists completely reject Jesus’s existence because they have an emotional need to refute the existence of God. They claim that Jesus did not exist in order to refute the existence of, specifically, the Christian God. However, other, less biased atheists accept the preponderance of historical evidence that Jesus did exist.

Atheists would protest that Atheism is not a religion because they reject the existence of the supernatural. However, by making a claim about the supernatural, they claim to have information that they could not have in a materialist world. So their claim refutes itself. Furthermore, the claim of Atheism leads to further beliefs. For example, one line of though leads from non-existence of God to the non-value of individual lives and to the Collective being a higher form of organism than the individual. The highest form of organism would be the State. Since, without God, objective morality and individual value do not exist, the State can do anything to individuals. Anything. certain States have done “anything” and do so today. This line of thinking, a part of Marxism, has led to the slaughter of more people in a single century than all the religious wars in history. If that kind of “revelation” and fervor about the supernatural is not “religious,” I don’t know what is.

Many religions pay lip service to Jesus. One relevant religion would be Buddhism. Buddhism, or at least a major branch or it, believes that the ultimate state of being is a freedom from consciousness and pain, resulting in “god” being non existent. That would make Buddhism a sort of a spiritual form of Atheism.

Now, it is a contradiction to say one believes in what Jesus taught while not accepting that He is the Son of God. As CS Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity,

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say…. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Jesus never said, “Worship me because I am God.” He followed one of the great rules of writing prose, Don’t tell them; show them. He made many claims that, against the backdrop of Jewish theology, were claims to divinity. He claimed authority over the Sabbath. He cast out demons by His own authority. He taught by His own authority without ever saying, “Thus says the Lord….” He claimed to have existed before the world and to have shared the glory of God. He claimed to have the power to judge and to forgive sins, which God alone can do. He even applied to Himself the name, I AM, that God had revealed to Moses. And he accepted worship and being called, “My Lord and my God!”

If Jesus was not the Son of God, then He was a liar, so His “teachings” would be morally dangerous. Indeed, by rejecting His divinity, you have already rejected a very large portion of His teachings. And the word for that religion is inconsistent.

Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler. Feel free to use this for non-remunerated purposes, but please give credit where credit is due.