Peter Brietbart, of Brighton, in England, is a writer for the Freethinker Magazine and a self described, skeptic, atheist, humanist, secularist and President of Sussex University Secular Society."

That is fine.

He is also a budding film make on a shoestring budget.I complement him for his entrepreneurship.

He has zeroed in on a quote from C.S.Lewis in his soon-to-be-released film, "Madman or Something Else."

Here is the quote (and I have used it often to call people to faith):

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell."

"You must make your choice"

"Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

As much as I respect C.S. Lewis, to allow this quote of his to define the entire debate over the ethics of the Kingdom of God that Jesus summarized in the Sermon on the Mount is faulty (even though I may have used the argument myself a time or two).  Peter Brietbart does. 

Even if I were not a Jesus follower, I believe I would be attracted to what I intrinsically perceive as true in principles of fidelity, non-violence, heart-origin of violence, forgiveness, and the other issues addressed there.

Brietbart says, "Jesus of Nazareth was an awful moral philosopher. He compares badly to such modern greats such as Mill, Rawls or Ross and also to historical thinkers such as Aristotle, Diogenes or Plato."

I never got the same sense of intrinsic truth and balance from these other great thinkers. Why I perceive tJesus' teachings as intrinsically true and truth is another discussion. Why did Ghandi?  I sense that it has something to do with an implanted seed of response-capacity within us …. but there I go getting all spiritual.

All that aside, Peter Brietbart, producer of the film, in the trailer (which, in all fairness, is all I can evaluate at this point), zeroes in on the issue of mortality and immortality while proposing to criticize Jesus' ethics. That seems a tad incongruous to me. Jesus' teachings on immortality were quite clearly not a denial of death, but a defiance of death while confronting it, validating its reality, and experiencing its pain fully. He never minimized its impact or taught His followers to devalue the reality that we must live with a sense of the finite nature of time.

The teachings on eternal life, namely that one aspect of eternal life that speaks to life beyond death, is an encouragement to live and love morally, but not the only reason He gave for doing so.

Perhaps I have played into the usual strategy of film-makers to get free publicity by creating controversy before the release of their films. I am neither encouraging nor discouraging viewing of this one. I am merely pointing to what I see as flaws on the front end.

To quote from the web site, "God is little more than a pleasant fable for adults, a pacifier for the mind that quells the nervous forebodings of death. "

I find that simplistic and uninformed. Jesus wept and agonized over death. He was not pacified.

Nothing in the God-message of the Bible has ever pacified me within my soul. To the contrary, divine comfort has tended to stir me, move me, and motivate me to disturb the status quo and keep questioning myself.

"His moral contributions are not original, and his original contributions are not moral. "

I am curious to see which teachings the producers are referring to here:

Love your neighbor?

Forgive and keep forgiving?

Your sins are forgiven; go and sin no more?

Love one another?

Perhaps he is speaking of the call to give, be peacemakers, live non-violently, welcome children or Jesus' example of treating women with dignity and respect. I am not sure.

Had no one ever hinted at these things before? Maybe. Certainly some of the prophets did.  Had anyone embodied or clearly presented them as a whole with such impact? Who? When? Where?

In an out–take frame on the web site, a character is viewing a book with a chapter title, "The Law of Reciprocity," which we have come to know as "the Golden Rule."

Was it original to Jesus' teaching? No. We do not claim it to be so. If is in the Hebrew scriptures. It has its versions in other religious traditions. It is a universal truth, not a hidden mystery.

I applaud Peter Brietbart for getting down and dirty with the debate. At least he is honestly disclosing his  position and his influences. I have read some of his Twitter and blog posts. He is not a light-weight thinker, but he frames the arguments selectively and, I believe, erroneously. Perhaps this is the next and last arena of debate and maybe Lewis is keeping us all honest.

Yet, I think it is still possible for those who struggle with the claims of Jesus with regard to immortality and the nature of God, to stick their feet in the cooling waters of His moral teachings and find something refreshing that rings true. That is what Brietbart is questioning here and I believe he is on shaky philosophical ground in doing so.

You can make up your own mind, but I am sticking with the skeptics of Jesus' day who said, "No one ever spokethe way man does." Bible Gateway passage: John 7:46 – New International Version.

I can hear a storm coming :) I encourage my friends who jump in on this to be respectful of each other. I have no quarrel with honest skeptics.

See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sZBgdGRhDQ