I disagree that Jesus had to be outstanding in any way to end up the central character of a religion created by others. He just needed to be in the right place at the right time.
I know that I also had cleary said in those exact words that he was at the right place and the right time. For instance, there's always some stronger than average, or "extraordinary" or charismatic personality in the crowd somewhere, but their impact has to be a matter of timing, being in the right place at the right time. I said all this clearly.
My only dispute with you is that you minimize him as only or just run-of-the-mill, just some ordinary holy man, and that makes no rational sense. There were lots of ordinary holy men at that right time and right place as Jesus was too, but how many of them got picked up and deified in a movement that spread like crazy? He had to have something that made his message stand out, whereas others did not. It's just common sense to me.
I use the word exemplary because Christians claim and assume that the life of Jesus was exemplary, and that we should follow that example and be Christlike, and I challenge that claim.
But yet, each time you put those words into my mouth. I'm typically very careful about my word choices. Yet each time you assume I was saying what I had not.
Jesus should have been more like Carl Sagan or Jimmy Carter and done something that actually made lives better or advanced human understanding.
From the stories about him, he did. He inspired others to start a social movement, citing him as their founding figure. I see him more like a Martin Luther King that way. He too was murdered because of what he started. That's a pretty good comparison, I feel.
Look at that sentence. When Christians tell me that Jesus lived an exemplary life, they're not talking about the actual life lived, but rather, one they conjured up with faith. I can't disagree with that, but these believers don't have a concept of an actual Jesus versus a mythical one.
Aside from your obvious pejorative about faith as "conjuring up" where your biases speak first, I also explained in some detail about how many Christians are unable to differentiate between the Jesus of faith and the historical Jesus, because they are unable to separate the meaning of the symbol from the symbol itself. If the symbol itself isn't factually true, then the meaning attached the symbol falls right along with it.
This is what I see you doing as well, as I earlier pointed out. You're just on the other side of it, where you see the whole thing as meaningless because it's not historically factual. In both instances, the meaning of the symbol and the symbol itself are fused together.
And to be clear here, it's not as you chose your words to say this instead of using mine, "an actual Jesus versus a mythical one". The Jesus of faith is an
actual Jesus as well. Faith actually exists inside of people, and actually has actual impact, influence and effects in their actual lives. I said, "historical Jesus differentiated from theological Jesus",
Both are actual Jesuses. Both historical and theological in this context refers to
perceptions of reality. A theological reality, also creates a physical historical reality too, through the physical person taking the ideas and acting upon them. Both are "actual". But one is material, and the other mental or conceptual. Then mind and material intersect each other and create realities that manifest themselves in the material world.
Here you and I are discussing whether loving enemies (or, elsewhere, believing by faith, or being meek, or turning the other cheek) is good advice. You think it is. To me, it is obviously bad advice, so I can only conclude that you have accepted these claims uncritically and now attempt to defend them without supporting evidence.
As I said, you are seeing faith in the same way they are, only disbelieving it instead of believing it on those terms as both they and you define in those ways. Your conclusion about me is completely wrong because of that.
I cannot be clearer that I do not conflate the Jesus of faith with the Jesus of history. To "accept claims uncritically and defend them without supporting evidence" only would apply if I was to try to say that the Jesus of faith is literal historical facts, conflating the meanings of the symbols with the material symbols themselves.
Think of it in terms like this. Someone sees that their deity can be reached by going before a stone idol of it, where offerings and incense are laid and prayers there will be answered. When they see that stone statue, that is where their god is for them, and becomes their god to them. They have to go there to see him and talk with him and petition him.
Now along comes a "skeptic", who smashes that stone idol with a sledge hammer, breaking it into hundreds of pieces and leaving a pile of rubble and dust where it once stood. The believer is horrified! His god has been destroyed! Now disaster will befall his family because his god is gone! And the 'skeptic' who smashed it also believe now that he has destroyed that god, and it no longer can be real anymore because the stone in which it resided was destroyed.
This is exactly what I mean by fusing the meaning of the symbol with the symbol itself. Both the believer and the "skeptic" assume the exact same thing about it. The god is only in the stone. If the stone is pulverized, so is the god.
And then along comes someone else, like me in this example, who says, no, both of you got it wrong. The god was inside you the whole time, and it was faith that took the stone and put the meaning of the faith into the object of that faith. You can just choose another object to put your faith into, or transcending putting your faith into any idol at all and recognizing that it lives in everything and in nothing in particular at all.
