Re: Do you ever doubt God's existence?

[Mars_ax]

"There is however a large number of secular theologians and biblical scholars (including me) who've found "Jesus" to be historically non-existent." What exactly is a large number? Whatever that number is, is it also safe to say that an even larger number believe him to have actually existed? I'm no self proclaimed expert on this topic but it would seem that if more secular theologians and biblical scholars believed that then it would be a more widely held belief versus a small percentage and even more so in the intellectual circles. I'm agnostic and have done a fair amount of reading from both sides of the street on Christianity and Jesus particularly and can't say I've read a book from the secular side denying he even existed. I've read a lot with differing opinions on the details and timeline of his life but none that out and out denied him to even have existed. To believe he never lived is to then believe that he was created by a group of people as a imaginary figure head that then spawned one of the largest religions in history. More so that the authors of all the letters written to the different churches of the day chronicling his life were complicit in the fraud. I think it is rather easy to dismiss a man for the lack of record of his life when his familiarity came well after his death. Not to mention its not like we can head over to a public records depository from 2k years ago and furthermore that there is no records of probably more 99% of the people that lived and died during the time Jesus was supposed to be alive. Dismissing the beliefs of the Muslim and Jewish religions acknowledgement of Jesus as simply a popularity vote fails to take into account that they more than anyone would benefit from factual proof that he never walked this Earth and state it daily. IMHO it almost takes more of a degree of faith to believe that the man that spawned one of the largest religions in the world was actually just a conspiracy created by a group of people than to even acknowledge he did in fact walk this Earth at one point.

Charlie, my argument is, there's virtually no secular historical evidence confirming that the jesus depicted in the "gospels" and/or New Testament is anything other than a fabricated character in a religious text/novel. Frankly, I couldn't give a fuck less, what christians, muslims, jews, or anyone else chooses to believe, I don't buy any of that bullshit.