The False Logic That if Jesus is Not God He Was a Lunatic

I am utterly amazed at the pronouncement by Modern Christian Theologians that for Jesus' teachings to have any moral validity that he has to be God! It is quite putting the cart before the horse! It is like saying that if he had not risen from the dead after his crucifixion that all the things he taught, all the people he healed, would be of no consequence! However these theologians go further: they claim that if Jesus was only a man, his life would be tantamount to the ravings and behavior of a lunatic! "Lunatic" and even "demon" are the words these Christian "apologists" use. I would never use those words in the same sentence as Jesus' name, even in their theoretical sense of him being mortal rather than divine. Jesus was one of the most morally enlightened figures to make it onto the human record, God or not. For people like me who venerate him for the noble and courageous being he exemplified, he could have died of old age lounging in a boat with a fishing line dragging in the Sea of Galilee, and I would still find the mere words he left behind for us to be morally arresting. His spiritual communication brought a sense of liberation to people in his own lifetime, and his followers felt inspired to carry on his wonderful teachings after his untimely death. The spiritually parched world of the Roman Empire was thirsting for a person of wisdom and compassion who could articulate so well the moral need for human equality. That is why his teachings took off into a religion that spanned the length and breadth of the Mediterranean Sea within two generations of his death. For centuries, slaves and commoners had been ground down, increasingly disenfranchised and treated like miserable animals, or even got legally defined as "tools" rather than living beings in Roman jurisprudence. And there were even free and socially privileged people who were sickened by the inhumanity they witnessed in the daily life of the Empire. Jesus' message was the answer. If Jesus had only just performed a series of dramatic magic tricks, and then rose from the dead after his execution, no one would remember him. There would be no lasting universal religion that could have emerged from such a personality. Wonderworkers were a dime a dozen in the Ancient World -- had been for thousands of years. But finding a person who (just for example) taught a predatory tax-collector to love his fellow man and put aside his sinful ways by befriending that tax collector as he had never known friendship before, is NOT the behavior of a lunatic or a demon, nor does it need to be that of a god. It is the act of a morally enlightened soul with a truly wonderful gift of humanity. Jesus renewed souls with his kindness and wisdom, something we are all capable of if we care to learn and love.