Thanks Tom for the thoughtful responses. I responded to the first issue elsewhere (but never said anything about "my way or the highway").
Concerning the "teachings" of Jesus. I used to think these were pretty OK, and only later realized that I was cherry-picking (or more accurately, someone was cherry-picking for me). Some of them are, indeed, profound and beautiful, but some are the very essence of the problem. These are the passages where he claims to be something or other... that Christians later interpret to mean 1) that he is/was God, and 2) believing in him as God as the only way to heaven. It was only much later when I discovered the Jesus Seminar that I fully realized how dodgy everything in the New Testament is, and that ALL of the sayings of Jesus have been written by someone else. The Jesus Seminar, itself, was established to sort out what might and likely is not the authentic "voice" of Jesus and what is religious agenda being put into his mouth, or bending the story in other ways. Over 100 CHRISTIAN scholars determined that the historic Jesus would NOT have said well over SEVENTY PERCENT of the so-called "red letter" passages INCLUDING any claims to be a god or even a savior.
So, yes, I still consider Jesus (or Yeshua, as he would know his name) was consciously advanced for his era. He ranks as a radical liberal. I don't find him as advanced as some of the Eastern founders - simply because the "love" Jesus proscribed was pretty much all about the humans. There was little in his ministry that suggested love for the world itself, which most of the Eastern and indigenous) spiritual traditions make a point of emphasizing. So the non-seafaring desert sheepherder's antipathy toward nature carried forward into Christianity, which went on to destroy the nature-loving pagan spiritualities of Europe and the New World.
How different might the world be if Jesus had commanded us to love the world, rather than simply one another? Well, actually probably not much. Because Christians haven't been keen on taking the easier task very seriously.
