"Gospel Quest" (or The Jesus Timeline)

[Mudhammam]

Your parents are also perfectly capable of being completely wrong about what they think they saw, heard, felt, or thought 40 years ago.

Which is exactly the way the human mind works.

When people tell stories from long in their past, they build them out of fragments as the tell the story. It's not like the entire story is stored in one place in the brain.

There is story after story of people that heard relatives tell family stories multiple times , believe they were involved, whet they weren't.

Which is why I find it astonishing that Christians think citing "eyewitness" testimony from the first-century is somehow supposed to count as "evidence" for the absurdity of their ideas.

1. When an event occurs that we are witnesses to, the process of our sensations acquiring the knowledge of said event is often distorted when it actually takes place, as in "I swear I saw a man in my bedroom...but then realized it was the shadow of the coat rack." Or, "I'm sure I heard a voice... ah, but it was just the wind."
2. Time accrues and our memories (for most of us) automatically begin to distort the nature of those events that we experienced.
3. Then we try to convey the story to someone else, and we can't quite put it into words, or if we can, the listener interprets it however they're inclined to.

On top of all this, we have presuppositions and a generally awful track record of properly determining underlying causes of ALL phenomena we perceive, even everyday events.

Hence, NOTHING can match the evidence that amounts from peer-reviewed research that is testable in multiples ways. Unfortunately, Christians have nothing when it comes to scientific research, and considering the nature of their claims and the scientific knowledge we do have about the human brain and phenomena "outside" the mind, it's all but certain that Christianity requires as much delusion as literally any other "miraculous," i.e. unsubstantiated or misunderstood, claim that DEMANDS our time and energy (oh, and money--isn't that convenient).