Christianity a scam?

[SteveII]

Yes, I've read the new testament. You can bookmark bible passages on biblegateway.com and I'm looking at it and I have almost 1000 favorite passages of the new and old testament bookmarked on my account. I used to quote some of the NT passages in order to justify my catholic faith against protestants (those pesky people out of the only true and real church.) 

But the miracles in the NT don't make any sense if you don't have faith. In my opinion, Jesus was like any other human person: unable to do miracles.

Here's the thing. You don't have ANY evidence of your theory. The only reason you believe it is that you don't think miracles can happen. So that makes your whole idea question begging. 

1. Miracles can't happen
2. The NT can't be true because miracles can't happen
3. Therefore miracles never happened--must be a scam

...

Some prophets are extremely capable of brainwashing their followers.

Let's assume we are Jesus followers. We help him stage a lot of his miracles so people will start believing in him (otherwise people would've been uninterested.) We want our "master" to be the prophet who will triumph over other prophets. Brainwash session after brainwash session, Jesus offers us many things (like the way Mohammed promised 72 virgins to whomever blew himself up in the name of his religion.) Jesus is so convincing that he makes us believe he's special but... he needs a little of help in order to convert the unbelievers. So we stage his miracles, hire people there and there and our sect keeps growing every day.

This shows your ignorance of Judaism. The teachings of Jesus and his disciples (that Jesus was the messiah) would have been an anathema to first century Jews. So, your theory hinges on Jesus picking the most objectionable thing to a Jew to base his scam on. Good thinking!

Romans and jews get annoyed, they kill our master, he doesn't resurrect (obviously), so what do we do? Do we tell people: "hey, Jesus was an ordinary man, there were no miracles, our sect is a fraud!" OR we remove his body from the tomb and (probably) stage his resurecction hiring a man who looks like him to act like Jesus "you don't believe me? touch my wounds! Hey, it's real!!!!" and continue his sect even after his death. 

What do we get? Well, we don't have to work hard during our lifetime, we preach to other people from town to town, people gives us food and money, we earn power and fame. But... along the road someone notices it and sentences us to death. Do we act like this?: "but it was a fraud! I helped Jesus stage his miracles! I didn't mean to, I'm an honest person!" Our executioners AND the people who believed in our lies would get pretty mad at us (they would kill us anyway), so we'd rather shut up and accept our fate knowing that people will consider us martyrs after our death (most disciples were already old men, so they probably thought "my time has come" before dieing.) 

Some of the followers are so brainwashed that they'll die even knowing it was a fraud to begin with. Because Jesus' words were so convincing they started to believe he was the messiah. So they accept their death sentence with devotion (has anyone seen this elsewhere?)

We, Jesus' followers end up getting killed, but our lies, our scam lives on. It perpetuates itself, it gains more followers and people who believe in it. Until some of the sectarians decide to write down all those lies. If you've read Biblical apocrypha, you'll notice they're full of mythology and things that go against the mainline gospels. So centuries later (people still don't have access to the gospels, they hear everything from the mouths of the sectarians), all the clergy gets together in order to decide which books are going to be accepted by all the members of the church, so there will be no conflicts between the gospels. That's why many gospels were left out and the ones that didn't have many contradictions (because even though the mainline gospels were picked carefully, they still contradict each other in some parts) are chosen to be part of the new testament. The gathering ends and the lie is secured once again (they also chose the books that didn't portray romans as evil people because romans were the ruling power at the time.)

You are making up things or you're just repeating atheist bullshit you read somewhere. The the books and letters of the NT were recognized as having authority hundreds of years before being recognized by any formal body. 

Justin Martyr
In the mid-2nd century, Justin Martyr (whose writings span the period from c. 145 to 163) mentions the "memoirs of the apostles", which Christians called "gospels" and which were regarded as on par with the Old Testament.[5][34][35] Scholars are divided on whether there is any evidence that Justin included the Gospel of John among the "memoirs of the apostles", or whether, on the contrary, he based his doctrine of the Logos on it.[36][37] Justin quotes the letters of Paul, 1 Peter, and Acts in his writings.[38]

In Justin's works, distinct references are found to Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, and possible ones to Philippians, Titus, and 1 Timothy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmen...tin_Martyr

Read the other sections from this Wikipedia article and you can see there is an unbroken chain of discussion on what was considered authoritative since the first century. 

Many people think, we'll.... it's the word of God! It never changes! But it does change! Translation after translation, copy after copy. I bet protestants don't have the same bible christians used to have back in the 3rd century. Even the Catholic church introduced new dogmas as late as the 19th century (marian dogmas anyone?) The lie is so big it cannot be destroyed anymore. Jesus, the human prophet's story, has been so distorted by countless people that we don't even know who the real person was. Sadly, it was distorted out of petty interests, thirst of money and power, desires to oppress generations of people, or just by flagrant zealotry. Or.... FEAR (If you don't believe he's the son of God, you will go to HELL) and devotion (blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed!!!)

You are confusing several things together. First, for over 100 years we have been using textual reconstruction/analysis to compare very old copies of the NT that we know came from different "lineages" of copies to ascertain what the original said:

There are more manuscripts that preserve the New Testament than there are for any other ancient writing. Although the exact form of the text preserved in later manuscripts may not be identical to the form of the text as it existed in antiquity, it is agreed by most scholars to be 99.5% identical in content, with the rest being minor variations such as spelling. Such variations are not seen to affect the meaning or interpretation of the scriptures and are usually given reference to as in-page footnotes in most of today's bibles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_m...anuscripts

Second, you confuse the Catholic church adding their specific beliefs about Christianity with that of original Christianity. That objection pertains specifically to the Catholic Church then and does nothing to support your thread title/premise.

But why did Jesus start all of this? Well, maybe he was a very religious person who was very concerned about jewish people and the way they were behaving during his lifetime. He might have also believed that the end was soon, so he did everything in his power to mend their ways. Some people have psychiatric disorders that make them hear voices or see things, what if Jesus had a psychiatric condition that allowed him to get in touch with "supernatural entities."

I could name countless reasons why christianity still exists nowadays, but that's not what's being discussed here. I want christians to give their point of view about why they think christianity is not a scam, why they think that Jesus is the son of God and that he did all those miracles for real. 

I don't want them to think that this is an attack on their religion. I'm trying to use my logic. This might as well be the Gospel according to me, but my logical mind is always trying to find a feasable answer. I don't want to believe in fairy tales, I want to believe in a religion in a logical way. But I can't when it comes to christianity.  

This whole thread was a poorly thought out premise with nothing to back it up but inaccuracies, opinion, and question-begging assumptions. Hardly a reflection of "I don't want them to think that this is an attack on their religion. I'm trying to use my logic. "