Does there exist a religion (or sect or whatever) that follows the teachings of Jesus (e.g., love thy neighbor, etc.), but either doesn’t believe he was God on Earth or doesn’t believe in God at all?
Islam. In Islam Jesus is a prophet of God but is not the son if God or God incarnate.
I’m not 100% sure, but doesn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses fall into that category?
The teachings of Jesus are pretty common in several faiths, at least some parts of Jesus’ teachings. And believe Jesus credited with saying them. But does that make them a follower of Jesus? IDK
nm
Don’t know if there was a word for his belief system, but Thomas Jefferson famously made a new Bible that cut out all the supernatural BS and left Jesus’ other teachings.
More directly, you’ve got Atheists for Jesus.
Many of churches with names like"Unitarian Universalist"effectively do this.
It may be buried somewhere in the fine print of their official theology that Jesus was God, but in actual practice, nobody cares. They emphasize morality and social justice, helping the poor, etc, but don’t waste much time or breath talking about God or whether anybody believes in him.
www.uua.org : “whatever you believe about God, or don’t, you will be welcomed here”
Quite the opposite - they follow God (aka “Jehovah”) and believe that Jesus is/was 'a god" but not God.
The OP asked if there exists a religion which fits two criteria, one of which is its adherents do not believe in God. Muslims believe in God.
My underlining. It seems pretty clear that Muslims would count.
For the latter, they’d have to be pretty selective about which statements by Jesus in the Gospels get included in his “teachings.”
And so on.
It was a poorly phrased title. He actually clarified “Jesus as God” in his post.
Jesuism? Thomas Jefferson also wrote a Bible devote of supernatural elements and dedicated instead to the teachings of Jesus, if that counts.
What Anne Rice seems to be saying presently is that she follows the teachings of Christ but thinks that Christian churches have them all messed up:
Do they? The wikipedia article is a bit unclear on that. It says they believe JC is the son of God, but that there is only one God, Jehovah. Jesus seems to be above humans, but not God.
isn’t this the belief system of the title dude in Life of Pi?
Without diving into a discussion of JW beliefs - their translation of John 1:1 has Jesus as “a god”, and many of the books they have put out have him the first born of creation and Gods son, but not God (other than the aforementioned “a god” reference.) Other scriptures in the NWT are also ‘translated’ in such a way to suggest that Jesus was not to be worshiped as God, etc - which is a change that happened in the organization in 1954. (cite - Jehovah's Witness historical worship of Jesus until 1954)
And also my apologies - in my earlier post - I was only looking at the title of the thread and not the OP clarification question in the first post - to wit I agree with you, the JW do fit the description of believing Jesus was not “God on earth” - I had thought the OP was looking more for the “atheist for jesus” type.
No - Jehovah’s Witnesses DO believe in God. Jehovah is God. Jesus is his son.
It’s not “with names like ‘Unitarian Universalist’”, it’s the Unitarian Universalist Association, and if a church (often called a fellowship, congregation, or community, because ‘church’ implies ‘Christian’), has Unitarian Universalist in its name, then it is a member of the association. There’s a long running joke that the antonym of organized religion is Unitarian Universalism, but we do actually have some coherency.
Second, it is not ‘buried somewhere in the fine print’. There is no fine print. Unitarian Universalism is a diverse, non-creedal (as in no Nicene creed, no shema, no shahada) faith (or lack thereof) community which affirms seven core principles instead of a creed. Abrahamic holy texts are considered some of the primary sources of our principles.
The rest of what you said is pretty accurate.
Unitarian Universalism certainly fits the requirements of the OP in that we recognize that Jesus was a real, historical person whose teachings have value and we don’t insist on either Jesus’s divinity. However, we don’t insist on God’s existence, and if a fellow member were to insist that Jesus was fictional, the most they would get is a cranky “cite?”.
Historically, the Unitarians didn’t deny the divinity of Jesus, but they didn’t go in for the whole Trinity thing either. Jesus was the son of God, which made him special, read his stuff, go do good things, now let’s get some coffee.