[RobbyS]

There are those Christians to whom the status of Jesus as God is more important than His deeds and words of wisdom. The most important of his words and deeds have to do with his passion, death and resurrection. It is his divinity that gives meaning to them. Witness the fate of those Christian sects who have followed the route of Socinius: Unitarianism dissolves into a vague ethicalism as Reason itself is discredited, and Jesus ends up as part of a pantheon with such philosophers as Plato, Confucious, and, of course, John Lennon.

[a_Turk]

It is his divinity that gives meaning to them.

I see your point, and that is exactly where we differ. It's his sacrifice that gives meaning to them from where I am standing. The divinity bit is there to impress the children.

Suddenly His divinity is more important than anything else, and the message gets lost, and we'll be alright even if we don't follow his word, but believe in his Divinity. That's the kind of thing that laid the groundwork for the moral bankruptcy that's prevelant in an unminimizable segment of western society (and yes, let me save you the trouble of asserting this: Muslims have not the same but similar problems).