I don't think so. It is the core of it all. If there were not claims about the sacred or divine character of Jesus, we wouldn't even bother ourselves to discuss such picayune individual.
Divine or not, describing him as "picayune" is simply an aberration of reality. Sure, he was Jewish hobo..... a Jewish hobo who defied authority, inspired countless masses with revolutionary teachings, and supposedly started the largest religion on earth, known today as Christianity.
Whether he was God, and whether he even existed is completely irrelevant. Point is, we have an entire book illustrating his teachings and feats. These teachings and feats have led billions into submission. Certainly worthy of discussion.
Maybe he was not perfect. So what? All people converge into hypocracy at one point or another. There is no reason to deny the general wisdom of his principles.
Ghandi, MLK, and Mandela all likewise defied their own principles from time to time.
No. The "questionable" are literal, immovable as rocks.
You have not sufficiently shown them as such.
A couple lines above you stated that "many interpretations can be proposed". Why the reversion back to absolutism?
You are basing on interpretations and pleading context, not acknowledging literal meaning.
Why would I acknowledge literal meaning in
figurative scriptures?
In your undying effort to smear this man's moral credibility you have developed the knack for picking and choosing interpretations that best fit your cause, regardless of contextual accuracy. All Greek/Jewish experts agree that the verses in question are metaphorical. If you were to take an unbiased stance on the issue you would probably agree.
You believe that Jesus is not divine, yet you
continue to hold him to an impossible ethical standard. Such is the paradox of your position.
As we saw, Jesus himself is portrayed as violent and selfish sometimes, not only in sayings but in acts.
Who of us isn't?
It is deceptive to take a handful of verses to define the man's character while completely ignoring the bulk of his actions and teachings.
Ethics depend on freedom. If your ethics depend on the commands of a divinity, the only ethics derived from that link is the compliment of the commands: you are ethically coherent only by following the command blindly. No cogitation involved. From this point of view, the Bible is an unethical book as a whole, except for the meaning presented.
No one ever did anything moral without choosing to conform to a preset standard, or without the promise of something in return (even if it is just a warm fuzzy feeling).
No. The followers believe the lie and kill in the name of that delusion. Remember Lennon: what if they declare war and nobody go? Then, there's not war.
What does this change? The greed and intolerance is still the basis of the lie.
So a religious war is also limited by the gullibility of it's effectuators? That goes for any war. Case in point- the war in Iraq.
I don't even think religion and instinct are related in the way you suggest.
Then it is a mere coincidence that religion appeared in direct correlation with the formation of independent thought?
The human quest for truth extended into the spiritual when the material world failed to provide answers.
Is it also a coincidence that the concept of "God" was individually formulated by each independent culture at the dawn of modern man? People thousands of miles apart, who could not even attest to each others existance each had their own God(s). The belief is present in every bloodline.
Instinct. An inborn pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a species and is often a response to specific environmental stimuli. God(s) are an inborn characteristic of all human cultures.