Paul, 

I echo your points. As jazzact said, some have been around a long time. This doesn't detract from their pointedness, however.

But some of the points do bear looking at from various angles.

2. This is a question that is not, to my mind specifically a problem with Christianity, but a problem with any kind of belief system in the divine. To my mind it's closely related to points 6 and 7 as well. Personally, I don't think any system of explaining these issues does total justice to it - there is a point at which one must believe (trust), or not believe.

3. I wonder what myriad of voices and babble you're talking about. In some sense, the myriad is to be celebrated, as it reflects a group/culture's own input into the Christian story through the ages. But what do you mean by this?

4. I agree that the Europeans (of whom I'm one) have done a monstrously bad job in a lot of ways. But I agree with jazzact that the claim of the uniqueness of the message and way of Jesus is rooted in the texts themselves. That Europe mangled that presentation of the message gives us more layers of garbage to work through before we can hear and judge the claim on it's own terms. In my read of the NT, this issue was as much a problem then as it is now. Certainly the terms Kurios and Soter, as applied to Jesus, caused enough trouble for the early Christians. Jesus is not the only person to have made exclusive claims to truth, though, so the issue of a claim to truth is a bleat against exclusivist faith in general.

I honestly find it hard to hang on to a trust in Jesus if it's only a hope (in the vague sense of the word) that it's true. It seems to me that the crux of Christianity is that it does demand a trust that the story is a real explanation of the way the universe works. I too struggle with actually believing this, and tend to think that if it's not true, then it's simply another beautiful ideology. Something worth aiming at as an ideology, but not a the expression of  salvation for mankind. As an aside, I find that Andrew's series on Toward an emerging theology and his bit on "my tentative beliefs" helpful reflections with regard to some of your points.

Danutz,

 I think it helps to think about community instead of "belief in Christianity". The complication is that the community that Jesus started - and his vision for a new world - were both rooted within the historical traditions of Judaism.  The vision is a kind of belief about the universe - how it came to be, how it is ruled by God, where he wants it to go - and this does reflect very directly upon Paul's points. It helps to think of working to make the world into the kind of place the vision of Jesus wants it to be, but I think that the vision of Jesus (let alone Paul, Peter, James or John) is not simply a new kind of society that humans implement. If it is simply an issue of commmunity, then we do not need to worship Jesus. All we need are his ideals. And then we simply have an ideology - a beautiful one - but still just an ideology which is as subjective as any other on the planet.

Does this make sense to you?