Fr.Sean
"Atheist theory"?

What is that?

So you think atheists all agree with what Dawkins says?

Well, tbh I had never even HEARD of Dawkins before a couple of years ago.

Who knows, maybe I would agree with him.
But I STILL haven't gotten around to reading anything by him.

And I've been an atheist for nearly 40 years.

Anyone care to refute Jon, or should I take the honor?

We will do continue to do our best in refuting Christ mythicism.

It kinda does, actually. You're gonna have to provide an explanation on how that religious movement started by Jesus ended up producing so many documents.

Luke has shown to be a reliable source, that's why. Do you think he was a liar?

Your other argument is a fallacious argument from silence.

Why do you believe they're mistaken, Doug?

A very prominent opinion, to the contrary.

You assume wrong Doug.

Not so, scholars, both believers and unbelievers, have consistently refuted Carrier's arguments.

I think you're missing the point of the article and therefore of Guest's comment, based on that point: even if Jesus was not made out of God stuff and wasn't turning water into wine or raising the dead, the historical evidence strongly that there was a guy with the name "Jesus" who matches Jesus' general profile and who was hanging around in the Levant in the first century AD, getting himself killed and inspiring a new offshoot of Judaism in the process. Numerous historians, many of them pagans or Jews who did not have an interest in propagating Christian theology, mention Jesus by name as early as the late first century.

And more importantly to Jimmy's point, historians of that era such as Tacitus also mention Christians as a whole as being very real--and they mention them in their own recent past. Apparently the Christian faith was widespread enough even by the time of Nero that he implicated them in the burning of Rome!

This means that by the middle of the first century AD, Christianity was still small but definitely on its way to mass popularity. They had already infested Rome and other parts of the Empire far from Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Golgotha--and from each other!

Just as the many cities named "Alexandria" serve as proofs to buttress the historicity of Alexander the Great's exploits, these far-flung Christian communities in towns scattered across the Mediterranean and beyond, which are 110% backed up by the histories, serve as proof that someone named Jesus must have been a preacher and community leader in the early first century. That many chapters of the Christainicould not have existed that early on if they were based on a myth made up by people and constructed around someone who didn't exist.

Now, are some of the legends surrounding Jesus, e.g. his supposed virgin birth, similar to myths and legends found in other cultures? Sure. But Livy also gives an account of Alexander the Great's mother being impregnated by a lighting bolt before Philip II could consummate their marriage--and I think we can all agree that Alexander really existed, even if his mother was inseminated in the normal fashion.

Just as correlation does not prove causation, a historical fact cannot be disproven simply because some clearly false legends are attached to it. Nor is it a fiction just because it contains elements that are broadly similar to an actually fictional story. Real life often seems to mimic art--and not always intentionally!

For example, in the 1975 movie Jaws, the leader of a community ignores dire warnings from scientists and from his own eyes about a deadly force of nature that threatens to kill a lot of people, all because he doesn't want the economy to tank. And so he projects a completely delusional optimism and opens the community up for business without first researching the problem and attempting to fix it. All of this, of course, only makes the economic slump permanent when the death count skyrockets, and it forces all first responders to risk their lives now, or even die, when things get out of control.

Well, now doesn't that sound almost exactly the same as the "plot" of how Trump and his buddies in the various Red States are trying to end social distancing prematurely during the COVID-19 epidemic? Their insistence on opening things up for business while an unthinking killer still lurks among us parallels the plot of Jaws to such a laughable extreme that one might assume they're doing it on purpose, were it not for the fact that no Republican has ever purposefully watched a good film, much less remembered its plot. But the fact that Jaws (and its theatrical predecessor, Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People was prescient in its depiction of politicians putting lives at risk in order to please business interests does not mean that our current events are some kind of hoax or fiction. Nor would future history buffs be acting rationally if they assumed, based on the movie Jaws's clearly unrealistic depictions of sharks, that COVID-19 was a made-up aphorism speaking to our cultural need to shed the guilt we feel when we stay indoors for days at a time, never bathing, never seeing the sun, and leaving IMPASSIONED responses to seven year old comments on an old blog.