To Christ's audience, the miracles which he performed demonstrated that he was God. Nowdays, it is the wisdom of his teaching and purpose which indicates that he was God. But the fundamentalist sweep of Christianity is replacing Christ's wisdom with Paul's absurdities.

Christ had the purpose of saving souls by teaching what sin is and how to overcome it. He did so with super-human communications, describing only the most important basics, stabilizing them with parables and examples and demonstrating them with his own life including his crucifixion. No humans do or say anything comparable.

Christ's crucifixion was a method of producing truth about sin—a communication tool. It said corrupt persons would use the power of society to crucify God for doing good deeds. A crucifix with Christ's body on it produces that truth unlike anything else ever could.

There is a guru in India who is said to heal the sick and raise the dead, and he claims to be God. So a Catholic priest evaluated him and said, sure enough, he's God. He was excommunicated for it in 1992.

It is not clear whether the guru can actually heal the sick and raise the dead, and it is not relevant. There are any number of tricksters in India, and plenty of supernatural abilities.

The only relevant question about the guru is how his wisdom compares to that of God's. The guru claims that he came back to earth as God because ignorance and corruption flared up again, and his purpose is to correct the problem. That isn't God's wisdom.

Christ said the world would always be corrupted and controlled by satan until the end. Solving the world's problems wasn't his purpose. Saving people was his purpose. But the practice of solving problems is necessary for removing the sin from one's own soul. The difference is in the action vs. the result. Corrupters claim the end justifies the means, while Christ taught that the means is the only concern.

The same thing applies to Paul as to the guru. Paul did not produce anything resembling God's wisdom. He didn't teach people how to get saved; he said sin was taken care of on the cross through atonement. And corrupters of Christianity replace Christ's wisdom with Paul's version of morality.

It is common for superficial Christians to reduce Christianity down to a relationship to Christ for the subjective purposes of feeling good and being successful in life. Christ taught much more than that. He taught how to overcome sin, not only as the path to salvation but as the means of becoming worth something.

A lot of persons want to be worth something. Christ taught how it is done. Being worth something to other persons is no different from being worth something to God. There are different degrees of worth in God's world, as Christ taught (Mat 5:19).

Because of Paul, there are two types of Christianity. Christ taught what sin is and how to overcome it. Paul taught how to justify sin instead of overcome it.

Vulnerable persons at the bottom of society are drawn to Christ's message, because they are victimized by sin and find social justice in Christ's message. But where there is power, the interest is in Paul's theology instead of Christ's teaching.

The subject matter for Christ was human responsibilities. The subject matter for Paul was some quirky concept of justice in God's head. If atonement really did change God, there would be no reason why humans would even need to know, except to diminish their responsibilities as Christ taught them.