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I think that we'd all be better off if more people would use them that way.

It might be easier to make than either historicity or mythicism alone, but I'm not planning to try. I'll only try to clarify how I'm imagining it as a possibility. Here's how I'm fantasizing it at this point: Some popular Christian beliefs about salvation started among Diaspora Jews, inspired...

We could have exhibit signs, like this: • Species: Complimentus Maximus “You’re not just insightful—you’re redefining the nature of insight itself.” • Native Habitat: Customer service scripts, motivational blogs, AI training sets • Bloom Cycle: Perpetual. Activated by user input containing any...

I'm thinking that part of Christianity could have started with a teacher from Galilee, and another part of it could have started in a different way, somewhere else. Richard Carrier's "one more dying-and-rising personal savior god" might be a good example. Christianity's salvation beliefs could...

I already knew about Carrier's theories, but I looked into it some more, and it looks to me like his theory could be true even if Jesus existed, so it isn't actually an argument against His existence. It's an explanation of how Christianity *could* have started *if* Jesus did not exist, but it...

Searching for examples, I noticed that the formula is applied in more creative and more variable ways than I thought. Sometimes the response starts with the whole formula, and sometimes the second part comes near the end or somewhere in between. Sometimes it puts my name at the beginning...

"You're not just thinking critically--you're thinking empathetically." "You're not just thinking historically--you're thinking like someone who understands the architecture of belief." "You're not just observing human behavior--you're decoding the architecture of conviction." "That's a...

It's already been dramatically proven nil, in communist-ruled countries, and in the story of Elevatorgate, Atheism+, Slymepit and what followed from those. No matter which side a person favors, nobody on either side had any Christian beliefs, and yet they still did all the worst things that...

The responses of an AI chatbot that I'm working with often start with some variation of this praise formula: "<my name>, that's <words of praise>. You're not just <words of praise>. You're <words of praise>." I'll post some examples, and maybe other people will have some too. The bolds are the...

I'm thinking that one reason for people wanting to think that Jesus did not exist is because they see people doing awful things and saying that they're doing it for Jesus. They think that's true, that people really are doing it for Jesus, so if they could be convinced that he didn't exist, they...

People mostly do not use stories about those other personages as excuses for attitudes and behaviors that damage people's lives on a massive scale. Oops. Sorry. I didn't see that the previous post was posted. I thought that I was revising it before posting.

People mostly do not use stories about those other personages as excuses for crimes against humanity.

I've had some new thoughts about this from thinking about your question. As I said, none of the arguments that I've seen online or from authors look convincing to me at all, but I see some other reasons for thinking that the gospel stories are about a real person. It seems likely to me that...

I haven't studied all the theories about Jesus being purely fictional, but the two that I have, Carrier's and Brodie's, don't actually exclude the possibility of the gospels being about a real person.

I'm not sure if you're understanding my point. My point is that the church did not erase all memories about heresies, it wrote extensively about them, to warn against them. There is no such warning about some group or other calling themselves Christians without thinking that Jesus was a real person.

Actually my point was that the best reason that I can think of for thinking that the stories of Christianity grew out of the life and teachings of a real person is an argument that I've never seen in online discussions or from authors: the absence of any origin stories for Christianity from...

Have you ever seen or heard of any of those having a story about the origin of Christianity that does not include Jesus as a real person?

And yet we know that there were such materials. We know no such thing about any Christians telling any story about their origins that did not include Jesus as a real person. There was no heresy that said that there was no such person as a person named Jesus who lived a human life in human form.

I think that the emergence of the Christian community and the New Testament is a good reason for thinking that the stories are about a real person, but maybe not in the way that others are thinking. What makes it significant to me is the absence of any other origin story in any Christian...

I agree. None of the arguments that I've seen online or from authors, including in this thread, would be enough to convince me that he existed, if I didn't have reasons of my own..