I believe there was probably someone who corresponds to Jesus Christ, who probably didn’t have exactly that name, grew up with a good cross-cultural education that included not just Judaism but other faiths, and who was a very benevolent spiritual leader who inspired other humans to write the ancient first version of the New Testament.
I think the literal resurrection story is clearly a re-imagining of ancient stories of death and rebirth found in other earlier religions, who have their origins in the nearly universal stories found in indigenous traditions around the world, which is about the cycle of life and death and rebirth that is found throughout nature and is metaphorically related to the cycles of the seasons, the moon, day and night, on and on.
I think that many modern forms of Christianity suffer from several problems of over-literalization, over-emphasis of their own form as the one right way, and over-use of cherry-picked Old Testament severe passages in ways that I don’t think the actual Jesus Christ would have endorsed at all. The Old Testament was part of religious wars with rival groups in the Middle East who had some female gods, and the resentment against the feminine still colors it, as do the Sun God religious war aspects.
I think my spirituality and morality would tend to fit in pretty well with the actual historical person who was the inspiration for the Biblical Jesus Christ: love, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, tending to everyone’s needs, shepherding animals, pacifism, not messing with people though monetary exploitation (begone, moneychangers!), etc.
I also believe there was a historical analog to Mary Magdalene, and that she was more or less a peer and equal of Jesus Christ, and that the Church has suppressed its accounts of her in order to better fit their patriarchal values.
But I’ve read about the many bad medieval Popes, the Inquisition, the Salem with trials, priestly child abuse, TV greedbag televangelists, ministers who incite homophobia, and on and on.
I also understand from a wide variety of theologians and scholars and spiritualists of various flavors, that the real spiritual message of all religions is not literal magic cartoon characters, but metaphor for the actual universe and our actual experiences, accumulated wisdom, and so on.
I believe the resurrection of Christ and the entreaties to find salvation in accepting Christ as a savior is all metaphorical. It’s about releasing ego traps and connecting to one’s own inner spirituality, benevolence, and true self, and letting the ego identity die to be “reborn” as that better and truer self, finding one’s own connections to the universe. I get that, and do accept that message.
However, I think Christ would not make the error of ego and claim to authority and exclusivity that the Christian churches and/or it’s less balanced followers have often made, where they get that message backwards and make it into something that comes across as “conform to our doctrines or suffer eternal inescapable soul torment!” That’s not love, and not something Jesus would condone, any more than he’d condone attacking homosexuals or charging interest on debts to the poor, or letting people starve or be homeless while others have all they need and houses stand empty, or denying medical care to people unless they pay up, or imprisoning people who smoked some marijuana, etc etc etc.
Salvation and heaven are metaphors, but I’m not sure about what happens with death and consciousness and so on. I’m interested in all of the well-documented accounts of near-death experiences and past-life hypnotic regression, and I find that far more interesting than the suggestions from conventional Christian church interpretations of an afterlife, because I think they’ve grossly misconstructed so many things, and I find the moralizing and grasping for conformity that I’ve so often encountered to be repulsive on so many levels. At a metaphorical level, I think if someone lives a good benevolent life and honors their true self, that they will tend to be greatly rewarded with happiness, and if they instead behave badly and don’t take care of their psyche, they will tend to suffer horribly at one level or another (or many). I think there is something about our consciousness that we don’t understand, that is not just mechanical physical goo, and that that aspect probably does survive the death of a body because I think our consciousness is probably something else, and so I think that euphoria or torture we find in life probably does survive death and wash up in whatever other bodies our consciousness attaches to afterwards.
So yeah, in my own way, I think I do believe and am a really good ally of the actual JC. I just think many forms of Christianity have gone way off point in many unfortunate ways.