Religion is a Mental Illness

Checks out.

That’s funny, that’s the exact same reason every religion is “true.”

At least with Harry Potter we know who documented this.

Harry Potter was a figment of J.K. Rowling’s imagination. Jesus is, at worst, a historical figure and, at best, the King of the universe.

And we know that there were many documentations of Jesus’ deeds and miracles made by not one, but several authors.

If you can’t see Jesus as God, okay. But ignoring his existence and work as a teacher and political figure is just dishonest. Do these same people go out of their way to claim the founder of Buddhism wasn’t a real person? Or that witnesses to Catholic saints miricles were liars? And do they study theology? These texts are deeply researched and some of the books are collections of letters written by the apositles themselves. Not every author is known. There are disputes about this. But again, why argue about something you don’t care enough to treat with any respect?

There is no physical evidence to demonstrate this character existed in the real world. There is only myths and legends. He is regarded as “historical” in the same way that Slenderman is regarded as historical, and even has his own page on Wikipedia. That is, he’s notable because people think he existed, not because they can substantiate that he did; the bible is simply a record of what people thought, not a record of evidence supporting him, or historical records of his activities (including the ones when he was alone and praying to himself and someone who wasn’t there was supposedly writing it down). The most remarkable thing of all about the Jesus character is that nobody outside the bible noticed or wrote about his existence, despite many confirmed contemporary authors who should have been aware of and written about this literal magician.

David Fitzgerald demolishes theist’s claims of the historicity of Jesus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

A “miracle” is something that is impossible - literally impossible - without your god directly intervening and breaking the laws of physics and reality. That requires you prove these “miracles” occurred at all, and qualify for this category. Which necessarily means you need to prove your god exists (and, specifically yours), otherwise they’re not “miracles” are they? And not just statistically improbable - your own ignorance about statistics, probability, medicine and the natural world around you does not make things like the cross at Notre-Dame, or someone surviving invasive cancer a  “miracle”. The unlikely, the improbably happen every day. With 7.5 billion people on this rock, it’s literally impossible for them not to. And yes, this proof needs to be independently verified. The church self-verifying its own publicity materials is not “proof”. Especially given the alarming lack of scientific knowledge they possess. (Or moral knowledge, such as not raping children, for example.)

None of them are letters by the apostles. Saying this is a public confession you don’t know anything about where your dearly held beliefs came from, that the attributions are traditions not authorship. That you think that goes back to their fictitious nature.

It seems like you don’t even know the origin of the bible, who wrote it, when they wrote it or how it was assembled - what was written to serve what purpose, what was left out, what was invented wholecloth, what was stolen from other mythologies, like Syrian, Greek and Mesopotamian mythology. (How come I do and you don’t? They’re your beliefs, not mine.)

It’s only the word of man that it’s the word of a god. Or any of the in-universe characters, for that matter.

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I mean, have you really never noticed that it’s written in the third-person, not as eyewitness accounts? There’s entire slabs telling the adventures Jesus had alone with the devil, in the same manner Mary Alice Young narrates Desperate Housewives. It’s written like someone going back after many decades to find out what the local legends were. Or writing a story as if they did.

https://religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com/tagged/origin-of-the-bible

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Seriously, go learn about how the bible was created, not just the fables that are inside it. I’m not even kidding, being rhetorical or disingenuous. Actually go and find out how the bible was constructed. The very human, very political, very calculated way the fables were curated and modified. Look at how many different ones there even are. All of them selecting out the things they objected to, to create the “one true” version of Xtianity.

It’s just a book of tales. You can’t use the bible as evidence for its own claims about magic and the supernatural, or its own infallibility.

If you can’t demonstrate it’s true, why, other than comfort, would you even want to believe it? Shouldn’t we care about whether or not what we believe is true?

Leaving aside all the other scientifically and historically inaccurate fables in the book - and of course the elephant in the room of why we should regard anything in the bible as true when very large chunks of it, from the “creation” to the “flood” to the Jewish exodus, have been definitively demonstrated to be wholly untrue - the entire crucifixion/resurrection myth is not just inconsistent and contradictory itself, but also historically inaccurate in its own right.

There’s no way to confirm or validate that he was actually dead - if he existed at all - let alone to confirm that he “resurrected”, something that primitive people were unqualified to evaluate, given nobody has ever done this - except for other mythical characters like Mithra and Horus. And it’s only the zealots, the devout followers who are described as having any of these encounters. Indeed, 1 Corinthians 15 doesn’t even describe Jesus’ reappearance - it just says he “appeared/was seen by” people. No indication of the form or how they ascertained this. If even these people existed at all, given this book was written at least 40 years later.

In any event, Jesus doesn’t actually fulfill the Jewish prophecies of a messiah anyway, so you can mark divineness down on your the list of the things you have yet to prove.

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There’s literally nothing to work with, aside from your misplaced outrage. There’s as much to justify Jesus as there is to justify Odin or Shiva. Lots and lots of sacred religious texts that describe their gods and their myths in detail, as truth, that you don’t regard as sufficient to believe they exist in the real world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_text#Sacred_texts_of_various_religions

At best, your Jesus is a composite of the myriad of Jewish prophets roaming around the desert at the time. Which might explain why “Jesus” preached both “love” and hate.

Reasons to Doubt Jesus Ever Existed (@atheistforhumanity)

Why should I treat myths with any respect? Do you tiptoe around Zeus and his lusty ways, hold your tongue about the latest search for the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, smile and nod at people claiming the Earth is flat, or regard belief that Paul Bunyan actually existed as reasonable? You get respect by demonstrating your idea is true, not by simply wailing for it. Otherwise you must treat all ideas with respect, including the really despicable, depraved ones. Getting upset or bothered that baseless myths are treated as baseless myths is misidentifying the problem: you believe something without good reasons, and probably for particularly bad ones.

Until you do demonstrate it, until you justify any of it, in a way that isn’t fallacious, or even have the merest intellectual honesty to investigate the origin of the stories you have committed yourself to, I have no more reason to believe your Jesus ever existed than Santa or Harry Potter.

Fair warning: when you find out how the bible was constructed, you’ll probably be an atheist. (Which is probably why you won’t, even though every Xtian should.)