Is God and the son of God the same thing?

[blazeofglory]

Some say Jesus is the son of God and others say he is God.

It is unknown. I think Jesus is a saint, enlightened. He has attained enlightenment through Sadhana.

Jesus has peaked a height and for that reason he is revered.
He has going through many stages, suffered, and humbled himself to an extent that is over and above human attributes.

He is closer to God, if not God.

Sermons on the mounts are some jewels he had gifted us. No philosophy can demean these sermons.

I understand Jesus as a man who is above all vices, an epitome of virtues.

[NikolaiI]

Christ said the MOST important thing was to love God wholly, and love one's neighbour as oneself second. This is the most impressive, and everything worldy comes eternally later, of infinitely lesser importance than this. Questions of religion, Christianity, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu; those are labels of the body, they are worldly labels. They do not correspond with spiritual reality, but rather correspond to worldy body, and worldy ego which associates the self with the body.

To love ones neighbour is as oneself is also taught in Buddhism. A zen Buddhist teacher explained it like this. When my neighbour is hurt, I should help them as automatically as I would help myself. If I am cut, I don't consider first whether or not I should bandage it, no, I bandage it immediately. We should show the same love for others.

Worship of Christ is a path to God. It is a path to enligthenment, to healing, to wholeness. Christ is an intermediary between the soul and God. Christ is the spirit. But we should always, and only, take shelter of God, and only of the pure devotees of God. We have accumulated bad habits by way of association with materially conscious people since birth. The only way of releasing ourselves from this consciousness, which consists of clinging to the gratifying of our senses, is by association with saintly persons, and by worship of God. Thus we should always turn to God, and always only take shelter of Him. In this way we can free ourselves of afflictive emotions which cause suffering for ourselves and others.

Everything we do produces an effect. Sense gratification produces the effect of narrowing ourselves, narrowing our mind. When our mind is attached to sense objects, then whenever those sense objects change or move, then our mind is taken along with them for the ride. This is why when something changes, it aggravates our mind. It's why we need to look deeper. We won't be satisfied just satisfying the senses, for we are deeper than that.

Love of God, which Christ taught, is the highest spiritual state. But we don't go there instantly. We have to change our minds from grasping, narrowed, which will cause us endless frustration, to being aware of the Soul of which we are a part. We're part of this vast energy; why would we be surprised if pieces of energy clash into one another, in the play of the larger energy? It's in nature to do this.

All comes from the light of God. Some Christians think that our nature is evil. But how can this be? Our nature is divine, just like our creator. Our nature is the same enlightened nature as the source of the universe, the Infinite Light, God. We are suffering because we are think we are the ego, and we are the body. I don't know everything, and I am not speaking perfect wisdom. But perfect wisdom exists within the heart of every living being. The Supersoul is within the heart, always observing. The spiritual realm is the true realm, eternal, blissful, and full of knowledge. Ignorance is the illusion, not goodness. The light of God, the spiritual realm, the soul, that is infinite. Material existence, which comes from ignorance, that is limited, and its nature is suffering.

My main point is that Christ's main point was Love of God. Bodily relation, ego, association, worldly concerns (I mean in particular political or national); these come second. In othe words, in light of the infinite importance of the former, they come not at all. God comes before ego.

[Pendragon]

Jesus was Jehovah made flesh, not a son per se, but a special creation for God to live as a human.

[Judas130]

Jesus, by the Jewish standards that he belonged to, was not the messiah, nor God. God cannot die. The messiah was a Jewish concept, and Jesus' death does not correspond with this concept of political and geographical liberation. It was Paul that spread the early seeds of Christianity, it was he that promoted these 'Jesus is Lord' ideas to the early followers of Jesus - finding non-physical meaning behind Jesus' death.
The bible is only a selection of text that benefits the Church's needs, there is much more text that is being kept from us - and much of the bible has of course been edited and understanding has been corrupted.

this is a large topic, highly debatable. I'm pretty tired.

My belief is that Jesus is no more the son of God than we all are. God in this sense is a powerful deity, and Jesus was a saintly creature, but no more. Jesus is one of the brilliant Jewish thinkers, which has sadly been turned away from years of persecution in his name.
There is nothing except his reply to the high court to suggest Jesus as a son of God - something said probably to achieve his foreseeable death. I'm not sure a line of text is proof enough of such a miracle, along with the understanding that the four gospels differ on so many other accounts, such as the baptism in the river Jordan.

God to me is the whole of the natural order, God is not a He, but an It. All of us are connected within it, and so was Jesus. I was raised a roman catholic, though never once prayed to jesus, seeing such a notion as blasphemous, and so i saw a clear distinction between him and the Big Guy. when i was nine i realised all the references to 'Lord' and the worship was simultaneously in worship of Jesus, and this was ridiculous - the 3 in 1 idea, which is but a concoction of the RC church. Ayrians (sp - NOT hitler's perfect race) were a group that formed after the first church, and they believed Jesus as separate to the Father, and they were punished for this 'hypocrisy', personally, i call it logical thinking. Seeing no physical truth for God, I see God as a symbol for existence, for our universe, a virgin womb of life, for the continuous cycle of atoms that we share and then pass on in death.

Jesus choose to live a life of abstinence and selflessness by choice, and we know he was a Galilean Jew, who were renown for being hot-headed - Jesus' liberal agape encompassing mode of thinking was what got him in trouble with his authorities in the first place, people were stunned at his easy-to-understand thought, which was highly controversial. yet he is no more a better thinker than Aristotle, Kant, or Buddha, though a very important thinker he is.

Jesus was only made God through years upon years of Christian's defending what they held dear, and through spreading these ideas Jesus has morphed into a very different person - he would never have tolerated the deaths of Muslim children in the Crusades, all in HIS name.

[crystalmoonshin]

I have an understanding that the Holy Trinity is one and 3 different entities. It is paradoxical but each has His own separate attributes though the three are bound together. Jesus may be the Son of God, but He, as a member of the Holy Trinity, qualifies as God, too.