I think that all the “prophets” and religious leaders believed in the message they preached, but they didn’t expect (or want) their messages to be accepted as divine and unquestionable truth – they wanted people to think for themselves. I believe that Jesus, if he was a real man and if his message hadn’t been distorted by religion, would still be revered today without needing needing to claim that he was “God”¹.

Christians often ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”, and I think if Jesus lived today, he’d be amazed by the magic all around us, and might even “find God” in a similar way to Einstein:

Sometimes he was really using God as just a sort of convenient metaphor. But he did have, I think, a genuine cosmic religious feeling, a sense of admiration at the intellectual ingenuity of the universe. Not just its majesty, but its extraordinary subtlety and beauty and mathematical elegance.²

I think Jesus, today, would be more like a modern Buddhist or perhaps a “hippy” (jokes are often made about Jesus being the first hippy, but I think all jokes aside there’s a lot of truth to that).

If we ask ourselves the question, “What Would Jesus Believe?”, whatever the answer is, I definitely don’t believe he’d be a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, for that matter. It makes me think of the Cat’s religion in Red Dwarf…

1. As far as I’m aware, there’s not a lot of evidence that he actually claimed that he was God, but even if he did, perhaps he meant it in an entirely different way.
2. Davies, Paul (2007) Einstein’s God

• Prince Of Peace – God Of War Gets First Review And A Release Date – A film by John Campea (of The Movie Blog) about Christianity and the war in Iraq. The first five minutes are available in the post.
• Ten reasons why beer is better than Jesus – and #11. Beer tastes better…
• The Ultimate Spoiler… – Don’t click this link if you don’t like finding out how the book ends (but… come on, you know you want to click it)
• The Primate Diaries: Today’s Math Lesson – The differences between fundamentalists and moderate believers and atheists.
• Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica instrument of debaptism – The “Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica” (that document you can use to ask to be “debaptised” from the Catholic Church – NOW IN ENGLISH!
• BibleMap.org – Want to know where all those places the bible talks about actually ARE? Look no further…