Jesus who?

One of the biggest things I had to do when I was reading the scriptures for Truth (rather than listening to the preachings and teaching of the "established church" was to confront everything about my faith from as neutral of a perspective as was possible. In order to accomplish this, I had to approach my long held beliefs as though none of them were true, and then proceed to see if they really made sense in light of what I was reading and (as Buddha said) what my common sense was telling me.

Jesus is central to the Christian faith, yet so much about him has always remained enigmatic. I don't think that God calls us to a blind faith, so here are some of the questions I grappled with. "Jesus is the Son of God"
Okay, what does that mean? The Muslims don't believe that God has any children - "Neither born nor does He beget", they say. The Mormons believe that God had sex with Mary. So what does "son" of God mean? Unless you believe the Mormons, "son" in the context of God means something different than what it means to you and me as parents of our own offspring. To take that even further, the Bible never says God only has one son, it says he has only one "begotten" son. Or to use modern day language, one "born" son. The rest were fashioned with his hands (Adam and Eve) or adopted (the rest of us - but I'm getting ahead of myself here).
The creation account in Genesis says that Adam was created in the Image of God. An image is an exact picture or a reflection of the original. Without question, the Bible is saying that Adam was created to exactly reflect the attributes of God. Sound familiar? Yeah, Jesus said that "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father," and that he only does what he sees the Father doing. Sounds like a reflection to me. Adam, however, chose to sin and thus no longer reflected God perfectly. I believe that Adam was a son of God. Just not a "begotten" son. He was fashioned by God, looked just like God, and was given tasks to perform and a charge by God to accomplish (he was told to "subdue the earth" - a whole different discussion altogether) and the breath of God gave him life. Sounds pretty much like a Father/son relationship to me.
The scriptural concept of the Trinity is questionable. It's not directly found anywhere in the Bible, it is only implied by church doctrine. Furthermore, the Bible never implies that we should pray to Jesus. Jesus himself tells us not to pray to him, but to "our Father in heaven" (not just his father,, implying multiple "children"). Jesus was a son of God in much the same way that Adam was a son of God. Before the fall, Adam reflected God perfectly. Jesus was born from the seed of God, but never fell. He saw through the lies of the enemy much like Neo the character in the movie "The Matrix" did. Would we then pray to Adam the same way we pray to Jesus? Of course we would not! But why not? Because we mistakenly have accepted thousands of years of church doctrine in lieu of Biblical truth. "But wait a minute," you say, "Doesn't the Bible say that Jesus was there from the beginning?" Yes, because Jesus was a perfect reflection of God in character, the spirit of God that existed in him was unblemished and indeed part of God that has always been there from the beginning of time. But the same could have been said of Adam, had Adam chosen not to sin. God created mankind perfect, in his image, born with his spirit. Our imperfections don't change that. We are his pure spirit. Unlike Jesus, however, we've taken His pure spirit and made it unclean on the outside by rolling around in the dirt.

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