Christians believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, that he was resurrected to life after the third day of his death by crucifixion, that he performed miracles, etc, etc.
As an atheist I obviously cannot believe all this. When there is no God, how can there be a son of God ? How can a dead person come alive after being dead for 2 days ? And since I believe in science, how can I believe in miracles ?
What I believe is this : at the time of Jesus, the Jewish priests in Palestine, and particularly in Jerusalem, had become corrupt, and the Jewish religion had become a means of deceiving the gullible Jewish people. Jesus, being a good man, was horrified seeing all this.
Most people who see wrong things going on all around them, remain silent, fearing that if they raise their voice against it, the powerful vested interests profiting from these wrongs will retaliate and do them harm.
However, there are some sensitive and good people who simply cannot tolerate this state of affairs, and become determined to expose and oppose it, whatever the risk. Jesus was one of these. His aim was certainly not to create a new religion, but to reform the Jewish religion and practices, particularly the crooked practices of the Jewish priests. This so infuriated the latter, who fearing that their vested interests would be adversely affected, got him crucified.
Now it seems that when he grew up, Jesus had become some kind of ‘sadhu’ ( like many who abound in India ). He claimed to be getting revelations and messages of God ( like Prophet Mohammad P.B.U.H 600 years later ), and had gathered numerous disciples and followers, particularly since he himself set very high personal moral standards of conduct. After his death, Jesus’ message was spread to many parts of the Roman Empire, particularly by Paul of Tarsus, who could do so because the Roman Empire provided security to travellers.
Jesus’ message was, in a nutshell, this : the Kingdom of God is at hand, i.e. it is imminent, and will come into existence very soon, within one’s lifetime, not in the remote future. So people should repent of their sins and become good, turning over a new leaf, and that will thereby send them to paradise when they die, where they will live a comfortable life, otherwise they will be sent to hell fire.
This message may not make sense to us today, but it made a lot of sense to people living 2000 years ago, when most people were superstitious and unscientific.
And it made a lot of sense to the slaves, artisans, and poor people of Rome, who together constituted about 90% population of Rome, and who toiled day and night, doing hard, continuous, unending, nerve wracking work of crushing drudgery, which stultified and degraded them. while the rich senators and merchants of Rome lived in great magnificence and luxury.
To escape from their miserable existence, the former readily accepted a religion which gave them a hope and prospect of leading a happy, comfortable afterlife, devoid of their sufferings. The preachers of this new religion were men who led austere, unblemished, very high personal moral lives, which made their words readily acceptable to the populace.
Once Christianity became well established in Rome, it rapidly spread to other parts of the Roman Empire, steadily gaining more and more converts, and this process was greatly accelerated by Constantine the Great, who became Roman Emperor in 306 A.D. and supported Christianity
I respect Christianity because it gave a degree of social emancipation ( even if mostly in imagination ) to the suppressed sections of society, and I respect it for its ethical teachings. But beyond that, being a scientific person, I regard its metaphysics, etc as mostly unscientific nonsense.
http://justicekatju.blogspot.com/2016/07/religion-and-science-are-diametrically.html