Of course you know religion and politics are the two things which inflame people the most, so I am reluctant to get into this, but it is my personal opinion that Jesus's life represented something which is timeless. There are many others who lived similar lives, to a greater or lesser degree - for example, Krishna
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jckr1.htm

It is hard to look at the Jesus story objectively because of facts getting lost in time and because of how people have taken the story and bent it to mean what they want to believe it means over time.

Imagine if we could just take the story of Jesus's life, and the things he is claimed to have said, as is with no religious (or anti-religious) belief or stimulus attached to it, like we can with the ancient Greek or Roman myths, or like people do with the sayings of the Buddha. We could probably get more out of it.

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