@Seriouslymole Thats an interesting one. As I was a cradle catholic, , I guess i didn't actively doubt that Jesus was the son of god, i took it for granted. So as it wasn't an entrenched belief backed up by evidence and logic, it was easy for me to stop believing in it once i left catholicism.
I always did have doubts about Jesus though, i remember as a child asking my dad- why is jesus a white man when he is from the middle east? Why is Jesus 30 and not married? I found out the answers to those questions when I was older and I guess that just reinforced my lack of belief in Jesus.
Very interesting article here: www.cardus.ca/comment/article/jesus-is-a-jew/
'I’m always amazed by how many people who have dedicated their lives to Christ have never actually been to Israel. They have money to travel, and go off to Europe and such places, but they haven’t directly experienced the clashing confrontation of faiths, powers, and tribes that marks Jerusalem today and was just as present in Jesus’s own lifetime. They haven’t given themselves the chance to appreciate how misleading it is to associate the faith with the serenity of a church pew or the reasoned domesticity of a Bible study. The world Jesus inhabited was a world of fractious intensity. The Israel of Jesus, like the Israel of today, was a spiritual and literal battle zone. He was love in the most hostile environment imaginable.
The starting point of the Jerusalem view of Jesus is the fact that is everywhere acknowledged but rarely given sufficient weight. Jesus was Jewish. He presumably had the skin colour of modern Sephardic Jews. He wore tzitzit, or fringes, that modern Orthodox Jews wear and donned the phylacteries that Jewish men still put on. He and his disciples kept kosher. He argued with other Jews but within the context of Judaism. In Matthew he tells his disciples not to bother evangelizing among the Samarians and the gentiles. His ministry begins with lost sheep within the house of Israel itself, before it broadens to contain all the world. “Think not that I have come to abolish the Torah and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them,” he says in Matthew 5:17.
In my experience, many Jews today know very little about Jesus. But there have always been some Jews who read about him and recognize how completely Jewish he was. Martin Buber called Jesus a “brother.” Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, a leader of reform Judaism, once declared that if Jesus came back to earth today it would be at a Reformed synagogue where he would feel most at home. The Jewish writer Amy-Jill Levine says she doesn’t worship Jesus, because she’s a Jew, but “I also have to admit to a bit of pride in thinking about him—he’s one of ours.”
Rabbi Leo Baeck, who led German Jews during the horrors of the Holocaust, put it best: “We behold a man who is Jewish in every feature and trait of his character, manifesting in every particular what is pure and good in Judaism. This man could have developed as he came to be only on the soil of Judaism, and only on this soil, too, could he find disciples and followers as they were. Here alone in this Jewish sphere, in this Jewish atmosphere . . . could this man live his life and meet his death—a Jew among Jews.”
Jews believe they have a covenant with god. With jews, worship comes not just through prayer but through the mundane of the everyday life. Which is why jewish observance can be very intense, because the relationship with god is expressed through something as simple as a blessing before drinking a drop of water, a prayer for looking at the stars in the sky. There is a specific prayer/blessing for the most mundane of action. So the relationship is very personal- as you are connecting with god every moment of the day and not just during prayer.