Seven questions — 

1. Who is Jesus in relation to God?
You recall that The Creator has given other beings, in addition to human beings, the opportunity and ability to create. There is an order of beings called Creator Sons, as I mentioned earlier, who have been delegated the powers of creation. They continue the creative embellishment of the universe that The Creator began. Because they are also administrators of inhabited planets, they are required to fully and completely understand the challenges of the human spiritual journey. To do so and to assume full sovereignty of their creative endeavors, they have seven bestowals to fulfill, the last being to take up the life of a material person on one of their created worlds. In this regard, Jesus did successfully take on this challenge. 

Of the millions of inhabited planets he could have chosen in his realm, he chose our world. It was in most need of enlightenment of its position in the universe. He chose as his personal mission, in addition to fulfilling his bestowal requirement, to reveal the true character and nature of The Creator to his material children on earth. His visit was also an inauguration of the broader efforts to uplift this planet's progress, and to influence the ethical, moral, and "religious" decisions of each individual person. God's influence is not intrusive, but subtle, loving, benign, and giving — bestowing upon each of us a broader awareness of choices for action, from within our consciousness and from without. The choices are always ours to make. We simply have more choices to pick from. Even not choosing is a choice. 

2. How was Jesus able to come into awareness of his divinity?
He began by first giving up his consciousness as a Creator Son to inhabit the presence of the fertilized cells that became the babe in swaddling clothes, Jesus. He began life as we all do, without consciousness, without selfawareness of who he really was. As he grew, his own Divine Fragment prodded his conscious mind to ask questions, to search for answers, to contemplate, to sit in stillness, to discover his true inner being, just as It does in each of us. It was not until Jesus was baptized by John that he was fully awakened and united with his Divine Fragment to become a fully spirit-realized human. From that point onward, he knew with complete awareness who he was and why he was on our planet. 

3. Why did Jesus die if he was a divine being?
As Jesus came into fuller and more complete awareness of the Presence of God within himself, Jesus began to reveal more and more about the true nature of God. He also began to illustrate and point out the vast differences in the nature of God as explained by the institutionalized Jewish religion. In particular, he revealed the infinitely true relationship that exists between each individual and God. He became a religious and social activist and revolutionary. Because he would not relent and submit to the established religious authorities, he was killed. He had made enemies of powerful church authorities and refused to submit to their authority. They arranged to eliminate him, and the local political-military authority conveniently killed him. As a Creator Son, he does not do anything to abrogate, change, amend, or countermand any free will decision made by any one of us. Therefore, he allowed his death to occur. 

4. But, what about the sacrifice aspect of his death?
That aspect is both "sweet and sour." The sweet aspect is that the Apostle Paul documented the life of Jesus. Without his efforts, the life of Jesus would have been lost and become a mythical story. The sour aspect is that Paul had to use existing religious explanations for the mortal life and death of a Son of God. For Paul and those who came later, the only explanation available for the mortal death of a Son of God, who is all-powerful and could have easily changed the sequence of events that led to his murder, was to use the existing concept of sacrifice as an explanation. 

For us today, even those of us with limited insights, that explanation is irrational. Maintaining this erroneous explanation of Jesus' death continues to assign a split personality to God. Paul had been trained by his Jewish culture to know God as being conflicted and dual in nature, and seen as capricious and unpredictable. We now know that if this were actually the case, the universe would have ceased to exist in the earliest moments of creation. A conflicted nature does not create a universe of harmony, order, and pattern that can exist into eternity. Imperfection of being is finite, having a beginning and ending. Only perfection of being can be expressed in forms that are eternal. 

Because God is eternal, consistent, and One with All of the universe and its eternal flow, the actions, words, or thoughts of humans cannot manipulate God. God is constant without variance or exception. Sacrifice of sons or daughters, lambs or bullocks, or oil or gold neither sways God nor convinces God of a person's righteousness. 

For us, the most troublesome issue that is revealed in this loving interpretation of Jesus' death is that we are truly and unequivocally responsible for our actions, and cannot wheedle, connive, coerce, or manipulate God to absolve us of that responsibility. Such is the price of free will. Neither sacrifices nor repetitious rituals or other gestures can change that; only right intentions and sincere effort can. Further, the image of Jesus can now reflect the true message of his life — that God truly loves us, that we are not apart from God, and that the Kingdom of God is within each one of us. No longer is Jesus the scapegoat for our sins or the pawn of an angry God. 

5. Then, is there any support for the related issues of atonement and redemption?
For longer than the age of the earth, there never has been a need for sacrifice to maintain a loving, benevolent, and cherished relationship with God. There is no need to atone for our nature. It is our challenge to overcome, a stone against which to sharpen our developing emotional nature and spiritual enlightenment, a steep hill we willingly climb in order to strengthen our legs for a longer journey. As for our need to be redeemed, we were never given up, lost, or abandoned. We are held as precious and cherished by God. God has never been apart from us. Though we may distance ourselves from God and feel apart from God and project that separation onto God, God is never apart from us. 

6. If the traditional Christian beliefs of sacrifice, atonement, and redemption were removed, what would the remaining religion of Christianity look like?
Go to the New Testament and glean only the words of Jesus. What were his teachings? He did not teach about himself, but taught you how to have a good relationship with God and with your fellow men and women. He taught you through his own practices of loving relationships with others and with himself and with God.

Give reason to what he taught: 

• Love God, for God is good. 
• Worship God, for in worshipping you come to realize that all that is good comes from The Source and you are Its expression. 
• Learn to love unconditionally, for that is how God loves you, and how Jesus taught us. 
• Learn to live in loving ways that exhibit the strength of your character, heart, and personality.
• Live in loving ways that contribute to your soul's longevity through moral and ethical decisions and service to self and others. 
• Live to express and demonstrate the totality of all positive and constructive potential within yourself for the duration of your human existence. Only by doing so can God enjoy and discover the expression of all Its potential in the duration of infinity, thereby contributing to the collection of all good decisions and service. 
• Love yourself as the ultimate conduit of God's loving expression and yours. 
• Love others in this same way and for these same reasons. 
• Bring others to awareness of God and God's true, undivided, unconditional loving relationship with them, and then let them make their decisions concerning their relationship with God. 

7. Are there any "don'ts" connected to becoming like God?
There are no don'ts. If you are to become creators in the universe as God is, you cannot create or maintain a small or large universe by don'ts, but only by doing that which is in concert with The First Creative Source and in harmony with the flow of the universe. When you do that which is good from a position of love, only good will be created and come forth. When you carry a light in the darkness and shine it forward, do you not go to the light once having discerned the right way? It is not a matter of avoiding the darkness but of going with the light.