JESUS <3

[paulpablo]

I'm not convinced that he was an actual person.

Also, the propagation of and population of cults is not anything particularly difficult or surprising.

The point is that a real person is not necessary for a cult to arise.   The jesus freaks would be the first to scream bloody murder if someone suggested there was a historical Apollo or Adonis and they would be right.  Those gods are just as much bullshit as Jesus.   But xtians are never far from special pleading.   Their god boy is always different.

I don't actually think it is special pleading to believe that Jesus was more likely to be a real person more than Apollo or Adonis for the reasons I previously mentioned.
I actually said in my last post Jesus wasn't flying through the air killing dragons in the bible, he was doing easily faked magic tricks and using common cult leader rhetoric that is more usual in the behaviour of real cult leaders than it is mythological heroes.

Apollo is a perfect example, he killed a dragon when he was four, he made love to nymphs.  He wasn't going around doing magic tricks trying to get people to join him, he was acquiring bow and arrows from other gods, infecting them with the plague and using them in war.

The way I see it is that the bible is Jesus's greatest promotional material, and even in that he doesn't strike me as an impressive supernatural figure, he just seems like a Charles Manson, Jim Jones type of figure, religious gurus in India are basically doing now what Jesus probably did 2000 years ago, and anything that does sound impressive you can just put it down to 2000 years worth of exaggeration building up.