Christian culture is a product of the last 3 million years of human evolution and is best understood that way.
I don't know what kind of a guy Isaac Newton was, but that is not how we judge him and he is gone now, so what does it matter. The gifts he gave us though, including calculus, are tools we use every day and are critical the science and technology we rely on for survival today.
Man, God, Alien or all of the above, Jesus is gone, but he too was a teacher and he too gave us tools that we use every day and that our civilization depends on.
Many might judge the value of the tools Jesus gave us by their longevity and popularity. I'm a biologist that studies human survival, so I understand those tools that way and they are critical not only to our survival, but our potential for future development. Humans have two primary instincts. The blind, endless "red of tooth and claw" most common in nature and the cooperation humans needed to develop when we became bipedal. Our brains rapidly grew in size to serve that need for cooperation and communication in that ecology. You can easily find the instinct for both within yourself. About 70,000 years ago, the human brain "re-organized". We became more efficient and we less needed cooperation to survive. We started killing again. Even before the killing peaked with Rome, the killing had made the world a horrible place. Buddhism and Stoicism were philosophies developed to deal with the horrors of war and the brutal world of the time. The teachings of Jesus about love and forgiveness actually told how to both prevent wars and how to end them. That has led to the modern world. It is even more important now because we depend on civilization so much as our life support system. Civilization is a created ecology that does not exist in nature . It can be damaged easily, especially by war. Usually, mass starvation follows war. Usually other disasters as well. Our future is dependent on our civilization. Jesus taught more than just how to preserve that. He also taught how to take advantage of the power of cooperation.
