Still a Christian - ask me questions/tell me about yourselves

[speedyj1992]

You've clearly put a lot of thought into your replies to various comments, so allow me to do some of the same (I won't address every single thing):

Well..... to tell the truth... if any thought was put, it was a long time ago... now I just rinse and repeat.

First, you can't know other people and where they are at all the time, least of all over a forum. Whether or not someone comes to Christ is very hard to predict, and can take years in some cases, in which I may only play a very small role, which I'm very okay with. 

True, I can't know other people... And I can't speak for any people who only browse the forum, but never even singup, let alone reply.
But, from those that do reply... I'm yet to see one that ends up following christ due to something someone writes on here.

Second, I didn't invent Christianity, obviously - as a religion, it exists to worship God, who didn't create sin, we did. I would define sin as all forms of evil, at all levels, within our existence and world, that we are all guilty of. Of course, we can't know what is considered sin without God, but that's not part of the definition I gave. 

So.... sin = evil?
What is evil?
Under whatever definition of evil you'll come up with, is any one person truly evil? Is any action truly evil?

And actually Josephus does mention Jesus, so ... 

As the person who the "chrestians" worship. He gets his info from believers... and not even directly from them.

I assume the "gospels that didn't make the cut" refers to ones that were clearly contradictory and inconsistent, both internally and in comparison with the others (aka Thomas' and Judas'). That's literally why they're not in the Bible canon.

Not all were so clearly contradictory.
The gospel of Peter, I think, is one that occupied much of that book I mentioned.

And Revelation was written somewhere between the year 70-85 whereas Christianity was officially adopted past the year 300 (I looked it up, honestly was surprised it took so long). 

Yep.... as the Roman Empire was falling apart, and would brake in two pieces, the western Roman empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. This ERE would eventually become known as the Byzantine Empire and had its seat of power, not in Rome, but in Constantinople, where, some time before, the Emperor Constantine organized the First Council of Nicaea with the unofficial purpose of uniting the people of the Empire under one god and make the Empire great again. HAHA!

In THEORY, we could be talking about more than one man or what you described, but it's highly unlikely. Honestly it takes more faith to believe that His closest disciples all lied about who He was to their deaths for something they didn't believe in and were able to write that consistent of a character considering their lack of educations. There are some educated screenwriters today can hardly write a consistent character, it seems. 

Aren't you mixing things up?
Were the disciples in the story real people? or fictional people? People representing the disciples of one or more teachers?
As with any cult, the teachers would be following pretty much the same recipe, so they could be virtually indistinguishable from each other.... but I digress into speculation...

As far as I'm aware, none of the gospels was written by any of the actual claimed disciples. None of them is written in first person. All the attributions came after the fact.

And lastly, there's basis in reality for Spidey, but we're talking about a work that was presented as intentional fiction to get across a point. The Bible is presented as reality, so your comparison works only up to that point.

Indeed spidey doesn't claim to be reality. Nor does Harry Potter. Nor does Star Wars.
But much that is presented to us, in book form or as online pages, is presented as reality, when it is not reality.
I can give you an example I have given before on this forum. A friend of mine once showed up with a story he'd been sold by a friend of his who he trusted to have made his homework. The story was that eating peach kernels, about one a day, would aid in warding off cancer and many other ailments. And you can go on your favorite search engine and you will find hundreds if not thousands of pages claiming exactly that! But none of them will give you a reference to the research that they claim exists. NONE! So, then I put my google-fu to work and found the wiki page about the matter and that one has a reference to a study performed that found no correlation between the administration of the compound found in those peach kernels and cancer. And it seems that this study came about due to the existence of so many people claiming it.
So, where did the claim come from? no one knows.
A gag, or a hoax perpetuated by the lack of ability of the common people to verify it and our very human trait of better safe than sorry.

The god claim, with the bible being presented as reality, is really not that different from this case. It just has the extra help of us being unable to perform any study on the nature of any god.
Anything that's presented as reality needs to pass the reality filter. Many things exist for which I don't really care if they pass or not. But the claims that believers make for their gods make me care for it. And, thus far, the bible (or any other holy book) hasn't passed through the reality filter.

Thank you for giving me a lot to work with. I'm going to try and answer your main points in a general context due to lack of time. 
1) I appreciate you admit there's only so much you can know - to be honest, I'm not expecting people to tell me that they've come to Christ, here or elsewhere. But my experience with God (and what I've heard from others who have also come to faith) is that it's a process. What I'm expecting is that if I do get one or two people who read my posts to turn to Christ, it will likely take months or years, and by that time, that person won't have any real interest in these boards, so there's no way I would know. And I'm ok with that.
2) Yes, people can be evil, and actions can be evil. There's so much that people have in common across the world on what's considered evil. 
3) I can't pretend I'm an expert on Josephus' writings or how he got his historical accounts. How we get information now is indeed different than how information was obtained more than 1900 years ago. But I would love to, when I have more time, read up on how he got more information and discuss that - for now, let's not do a big discussion on who said what or whether that was valid regarding the extra-biblical. 
4) Peter's is one of the ones I'm less familiar with, though the appraisal process for books of the Bible is the same as what's used for the works of men such as Socrates and Homer. The manuscripts of the other gospels that are considered canon within the Bible (more on them in a bit) have more than 25,000 copies each with really high consistency between them, and annotated Bibles will explain the areas where there are minor inconsistencies between manuscripts. The thing about the gospels that aren't included are that they tend to not have nearly as many copies and have less consistency. 
5) At first I wasn't sure why you were mentioning the Roman Empire splitting, but then I saw your punchline and you got a genuine laugh from me. Nice.
6) So none of the gospels were written in first-person, you're right - writing styles change over the years and through different cultures (i.e. ours is Western, theirs more Eastern). Having read each of the gospels quite a bit, I can say that they are all different while telling the same story and presenting the same person - each was writing to a primarily different audience (Matthew to the Jews, John to Christians, Luke to non-believers, etc.), and each had a different point to get across. Luke wanted to show Christianity is good, Matthew was more thematic in trying to prove that Jesus is the Messiah, and so on. Plus, Luke told things more chronologically, Matthew out of order because that was his unique style and order was less important to him.
7) With your permission, I would love to be able to use the phrase "Google-fu" in casual conversation. But to respond to the rest of what you said, when it comes to verifying reality, that gets hard in situations like this because you need to have a certain amount of trust. This could be argued today - for instance, did you know that BILLIONS of tons of salt are deposited on the ocean floor every year? You can look and find many sources for this, but in theory, this could be "fake news" (my turn to make a Trump reference), and you wouldn't be able to know because the people who would be telling you this is a fact wouldn't let you get a submarine down to the ocean floor to measure this and really know for yourself. 
My point is, yes, there is misinformation out there regarding things like the peach kernals, but we all trust in something to a certain degree, this is true of anything we can't really connect with in a super-direct sense. Connecting with God does take trust and it is NOT an inherently easy thing to make happen, so i understand that. The evidence we do have mostly comes down to the existence of people in the Bible and how the apostles proclaimed Jesus to their deaths, and a faith that it makes more sense that God created the universe than the universe forming from nothing (as with life). We can't prove certain accounts in the Bible, true, but from a fundamental place of trust, that's where faith comes in. To an extent, you are that way with more atheistic points you can't prove.