Great reply!

There are nuances (which I would like to explore with you) around the significance and role of Jesus, what being 'saved' means etc.

I agree, interesting topics. To me, "being saved" means getting as much of one's real and healthy self back as possible. It means being in touch with one's feelings and being free, to the extent one can be, from repression of feeling and the negative consequences of repression. It means knowing and feeling the importance of kindness to others, of connection with others, and where necessary working to put healthy behavior into practice despite any habits and defenses to the contrary.

I don't know if there's anything more to it than that; I never believed in the supernatural aspects of religion and don't feel any need for "life after death" or anything else; this life is what we have, and it IS a miracle. I'm open to the possibility of something else but don't yet see it; my lack / my loss, perhaps.

As to the significance of Jesus: He put the importance of love out there in plain language and in His own humble, courageous, and remarkable actions -- and captured the attention and devotion of millions for two thousand years now. In a world of violence, emotional pain, hardship, and ignorance, Jesus has kept the idea of LOVE and of a compassionate, healthy world alive in people's hearts even as they struggle to understand it. If a person has experienced very little love in their life and has enough repression to be out of touch with their deepest feelings, what can that person actually hear when someone speaks to them of love?

One cannot truly know what one has never experienced. THAT is why two thousand years of Christianity has had such patchy success at bringing love into the world. Not NO success, but far less than one could hope.

-- I'll forgo more detail right now since part 2 of my earlier comment, which I'm here to post, is already over-long and still only a portion of what I've written. Here goes:

When Jesus says "Love one another", he's talking about true love, and not about false love, don't you think?

Yes.

Think of a puppy, or a healthy young child. LOVE is the default; they don't need to be TAUGHT to feel love or to express it; love is the most natural thing in the world, like breathing. Love from a child (or a puppy) encourages a positive, loving response back from others -- assuming those others are emotionally healthy enough to respond in a healthy manner.

In the violent, blood-thirsty natural world of predators, parasites, and diseases, LOVE is the gift -- to other animals, but particularly to humans -- that protects life and perhaps more importantly, makes life worth living.

I'll talk about psychopaths (people with particular brain damage or lack of function) later. But aside from that small percentage of people, LOVE -- true love, as you put it -- is, once again, the default. ONLY trauma (beatings or other cruelty, emotional coldness, or other traumatic pain) can lead a healthy young child into what you are calling (if I read you correctly) false love. THAT is why Jesus made the point about not offending children so strongly. Trauma leads to repression and to physical and emotional defenses -- an infinite spectrum of them -- which cause harm to the traumatized person (alcohol, tobacco, and drug use, high blood pressure, suicide, etc) and to others -- physical or emotional cruelty, outright violence, lies, and so on.

The bad news is that nearly all of us have SOME repressed early trauma that blunts, to some degree, our openness to feeling and thus our ability to fully experience love. Most of us also have repressed anger as well as hurt (anger is a defense against pain, as well as a survival tool against threats in the environment), which works against our openness to love even more actively. And LOVE isn't the only thing damaged by early trauma.

The ACE Study (cohort of ~ 17,000 adults) shows what this actually means in the real world.

A short look at the Study: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/MediaLibraries/URMCMedia/pediatrics/training/plc/documents/PLC_10-ACE-Study-Handout-MSL-5-2014.pdf

To partially convey the impact of early trauma, here's a longish excerpt from https://tatlife.com/the-adverse-childhood-experiences-study-the-largest-most-important-public-health-study-you-never-heard-of-began-in-an-obesity-clinic/ --

When the first results of the survey were due to come in, Anda was at home in Atlanta. Late in the evening, he logged into his computer to look at the findings. He was stunned. “I wept,” he says. “I saw how much people had suffered and I wept.

This was the first time that researchers had looked at the effects of several types of trauma, rather than the consequences of just one. What the data revealed was mind-boggling.

The first shocker: There was a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism.

The second shocker: About two-thirds of the adults in the study had experienced one or more types of adverse childhood experiences. Of those, 87 percent had experienced 2 or more types. This showed that people who had an alcoholic father, for example, were likely to have also experienced physical abuse or verbal abuse. In other words, ACEs usually didn’t happen in isolation.

The third shocker: More adverse childhood experiences resulted in a higher risk of medical, mental and social problems as an adult.

To explain this, Anda and Felitti developed a scoring system for ACEs. Each type of adverse childhood experience counted as one point. If a person had none of the events in her or his background, the ACE score was zero. If someone was verbally abused thousands of times during his or her childhood, but no other types of childhood trauma occurred, this counted as one point in the ACE score. If a person experienced verbal abuse, lived with a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, his ACE score was three.

Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4. Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with four categories of ACEs had a 240 percent greater risk of hepatitis, were 390 percent more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema or chronic bronchitis), and a 240 percent higher risk of a sexually-transmitted disease.

They were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.

People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.

“Some of the increases are enormous and are of a size that you rarely ever see in health studies or epidemiological studies. It changed my thinking dramatically,” says Anda.

Two in nine people had an ACE score of 3 or more, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more. This means that every physician probably sees several high ACE score patients every day, notes Felitti. “Typically, they are the most difficult, though the underpinnings will rarely be recognized.”

The kicker was this: The ACE Study participants were average Americans. Seventy-five percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7.5 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 percent were black. They were middle-class, middle-aged, 36 percent had attended college and 40 percent had college degrees or higher. Since they were members of Kaiser Permanente, they all had jobs and great health care. Their average age was 57.

I'll say this: Jesus' teachings on how to treat children are rarely given anywhere near enough attention.

By far the most important thing we can do to encourage emotional health in people is to provide love early in life to each new generation -- from conception on. A healthy pregnancy, a safe and gentle birth, a loving childhood with plenty of social contact to help learn respect for others naturally, etc. FIXING emotional damage later is much harder and never completely effective.

More another day --