Although it may not have made much sense to you, you seem to have captured the gist of what I tried to say. Even athiests can appreciate the Beatitudes.
A common apologetic for Christianity is that you either believe Christ was God, or that he was a lunatic. The middle ground (that is, Christ wasn't God but merely a brilliant moral philosopher) is hard to defend given what the Bible says Christ did and said.
It's not a "middle ground" to suggest that the core beliefs of a religion are false. I'm not saying you have to accept Christianity or Buddhism or Zoroastrianism, but you might be a bit more self-aware.
"Middle ground" is just not a great way of looking at things. It's nice to be able to put things on a scale of
Jesus was a nice guy--->The bible contains divine guidance--->The Bible is infallible
That's fine for practical reasons (eg politics). But those are essentially different beliefs. They're not on a scale in the same way that Christianity, Buddhism or Zoroastrianism are not on a scale.
I give Jesus the credence I would somebody I met at a bar --->I admire his teachings and do the best I can to emulate him-->I treat all the information I can gather about him to be divinely inspired
What something is, that's dogma and inflexible. How I treat it is human nature, and infinitely scalable.
As a personal note, I think I'm somewhere between 1 and 2.
I suppose I did if the Gist of "Too many people confuse faith with the idea of absolute belief" is "Too many people assume that faith = literal belief in Genesis, Leviticus or Luke"
Certainly absolute beliefs matter in a practical sense. If I were in The States, Obama's beliefs wouldn't worry me. Palin's might. In the very theoretical sense, they both worry me a little. But even Palin's beliefs are probably less likely to affect anything to the degree that her social conservatism (related but not equivalent) is likely to have.
