Dewey, every living human being is the Son or Daughter of God. Not just Jesus. Jesus was demonstrating exactly how a person behaves when they, like the prodigal son, actually fully BECOME the completed potential of the Son that they are, and return home.

Your labelling of him as the One and Only Son of God is your mistake, and the mistake of virtually the entire Christian community throughout history (except for an inspired few), and it is precisely that which has led you astray and caused you not to understand his teachings.

He was the FULLY REALIZED Son of God. You and I and most other people are prodigal sons who have not yet fully realized what we are. He was showing how it is done, and what happens when you do it...how you think, act, and conduct yourself.

And that is: You love God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength, and you love your neighbour as yourself...because you realize that your neighbour IS yourself. (I might add to that that you love yourself unconditionally, and your neighbour also.) You forgive everyone, no matter who they are, just as Jesus did...because "they know not what they do".

It is of absolutely no help to put Jesus aside as a unique one-of-a-kind idol and say that He and He Alone was and is the one and only Son of God. It is the direct contradiction of what he was trying so hard to teach people and show them. He was showing them how to become what he became! He said it, over and over again. He demonstrated it over and over again. He challenged them to become as he was, to do the works he did and even greater works! Read your New Testament, look for that for a change, and you will FIND it.

Stop underrating yourself and everybody else, is my advice.

(But I doubt you will believe a word of what I just said...and that's fine if so...you have your own chosen path, and it will lead you home eventually. Every prodigal son returns home in the end and is fully accepted by the Father.) I place no judgement on you, but I feel sad that Jesus could be so totally misinterpreted by those who imagine themselves to be his followers.

One doesn't have to be a Christian to follow Jesus. I know any number of non-Christians who follow Jesus. And remember, Jesus was NOT a Christian. He was not trying to create the Christian Church, as it later became. He never said, "After my passing from this World there will be a bunch of books written about me by my immediate disciples and others (such as Paul). They will be combined with the old Hebrew books (the Old Testament) and it will all be called 'the Bible'. All you will have to do to know the whole truth is read that book."

Nope, he never said one word about that! And believe me, if it was intended that the whole truth would be contained in that one book, the Bible, he would have said so!!!! For heaven's sake, instead of letting just one very old book do your thinking for you, a book which Jesus never made a peep about, why not go straight to the source himself? You can go within and do that. Just by quieting your mind and listening. It is your blind adherence to a bunch of ancient books about Jesus that is stopping you from understanding Jesus in the first place.

If you had grown up in a Muslim society, I am pretty sure you would be doing the same thing...only with the Koran...and it would result in the same thing, as an impediment to your spiritual understanding of Jesus and his mission and your own nature as a son of God.

The only reason you think the Bible is the Answer is because a few hundred previous generations of Christians passed on that rigid notion to you, and you swallowed it. That's exactly what happens to fundamentalist Muslims when they decide that the Koran is the only answer. It happens in every exclusive, egocentric, frightened religion.

And the fact is, the Koran and the Bible both contain much spiritual truth...along with much that is misleading or downright untrue...but neither one of them is the whole answer. The whole answer is found within YOU, and it requires membership in no religion whatsoever. In fact, all it requires is total love and forgiveness, practiced on a daily basis. That is what distinguishes saints from ordinary people...they choose love instead of fear. In doing so, they become fully realized Sons and Daughters of God. There are a handful of such people among a million, generally speaking. We all work toward it. Most of us won't reach it in this lifetime, but this lifetime is not all there is. It's less than 1 percent of all there is.