Did Muhammad exist?

[The Grand Nudger]

Y'know, I've never gotten why the debate among atheists gets intense over whether biblical/quranic figures actually existed. I'm not knocking it or anything. The debates are interesting. But why does this matter one iota to a nonbeliever?

The narratives themselves are historically important. Zues wasn't real either, but the stories tell us about the believers and the context of their lives as they saw it. It's essentially an exercise in comparative mythology. Even more broadly, the provenance of christian demi-god stories give us insight into the political realities of then-extant empires. More than a little bit of what people believe about jesus comes down to taxes and districting, or the need to unite a bunch of proles (or their owners) as a uniform block for some other more practical purpose, lol.

The song and dance about big mo, for it's part, is explicitly political, and the two major sects of islam are still pissy with each other about how it all went down. Each insisting that the other got something importantly wrong. The quran itself was commissioned as a consolidation of state power under patina of illegitimacy which would be used then and now to circumscribe the new orthodoxy. In this way, the quran differs from the new testament. The NT was a choose your own adventure sort of thing leveraged for an existent state, much ink and blood was spilled..for example, de-emphasizing the culpability of rome for deicide (fuckin jews did it! - and didn't that turn out to be a historically important decision.....nearly 2k years later). The quran was a fresh pass at a new establishment legend manufactured at the dawn of empire by the victors of the first (and certainly not last) internecine conflict in the ummah.

So, there's a -tiny- demonstration of why people uninterested in existent gods might want to understand the specifics of the stories we tell about gods (or their purported mouthpieces). It could be an interest in literature, or in history, or in the way that literature provides insight to psychology in history (or the present). More specifically..as to why the debate can be "heated" between atheists. Recall that many atheists here were once believers. Even if they were never believers..the historical legitimacy of these narratives in some form or another has been self-servingly drilled into our heads for centuries. Consider the Lycurgan Reform of Sparta. We know that this occurred. Now imagine being told that Lycurgus was not a real person. Surprise surprise, he wasn't...or..if he was, we have no reason to assume that the man bore any resemblance to the stories told about him. He's not entirely unlike Mo or Jesus, and it's just too much for some people to imagine that history can be retroactively re-imagined..or that people would enact broad reforms without some singular impetus....even when the reforms appear to have taken centuries and wildly fanciful and contradictory stories are handed down to us about the reformers. In truth, the only meaningful difference between overtly mythical characters and legendary ones is whether or not people believed they existed..not whether or not they actually did..and they never seem to end up having existed as described regardless.