Paul's 500 witnesses.

[Minimalist]

Cecilia exists.  Your god?  Not so much.

Theists get so upset when you pick on their cosmic sky wizard. And all I can think is, well if he is supposed to be big bad and brawny and can kick our asses, why do they feel the need to defend him? Seems to me a bit hypocritical to feel the need to defend someone who should not need your help.

In the old days he went from a god who murdered virtually everyone because he got pissed off to, like an aging mafia don, a guy who had to hire people to do his wet work for him.  Its a shame when a god gets old and decrepit, isn't it?

Nowadays he's like an Alzheimer's patient who needs idiotic believers to change his diapers after he shits himself.

[Minimalist]

From Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus, pg 352.

That this would inevitably happen, and that the eventually successful sects would typically be the ones who started treating the exoteric myths
as historical fact, has been logically demonstrated by Kurt Noll. 111 Usingthe development of false claims of the historicity of certain figures and
tradents in early Islam, Noll shows that this is a common trend in the presence of intense sectarian competition over control of resources and ideology.
An earthly Jesus known in the flesh would be a more effective tool for marketing a dogma than a revelatory cosmic Jesus would be. Therefore
as churches competed for authority, there would have been an inevitable pressure to invent an earthly Jesus known in the flesh. The cult thus moved
away from revelation as primary toward placing mythical 'traditions' as primary, which does indeed appear to be what happened (see Chapter 1 0,
§8, and Chapter 1 1, §2).

As Noll concludes:

[T]he data betray a clear evolutionary process from the proclamation
of the so-called Jerusalem pillars, through the teachings of Paul, and
ultimately into several competing varieties of post-Pauline Christianity.
Earlier Christian doctrinal modes went extinct as later ones evolved.
The doctrinal mode favoured by the Jerusalem pillars was extinct by the
late first century. Although Paul's doctrinal mode was able to survive, it
could do so only by evolving significantly new traits, including a conceptualization
of a 'historical' Jesus guaranteed by allegedly eyewitness
testimonies. This newly invented 'historical' Jesus effectively replaced
Paul as the authority behind Paul's doctrinal mode.

In short, it is more rhetorically effective to claim Jesus was a historical person and that your doctrine can be traced back to him through a line of
living witnesses and tradents than to admit that everything known about Jesus came by revelation, which entails further revelations by upstarts
and challengers could carry the same value and thus could undermine the power of any growing church elite or the cohesion of any social mission. If
Jesus was known only by revelation, one could preach anything, and claim it was revealed. But if one claimed to be the keeper of a verified historical
tradition stemming from a real historical Jesus, one could argue against any 'new' revelation that 'that is not what Jesus said', because we have
documents from 'men who were there and heard him' and we have men who claim to have 'known' men who knew those men, and thus guarded
the tradition (hence Lk. 1 . 1-4 and Jn 21.24).

And before some jerkoff religitard comes by claiming that Noll "isn't a real scholar...."

Kurt Noll, also known as K.L. Noll, is an American biblical scholar, historian, educator and author. He is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Brandon University in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada where he teaches Judaism, Christianity, biblical languages and Islam.

He holds a PhD and a Master of Theology from Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (now called Union Presbyterian Seminary), as well a Master of Arts (Honors) from Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg and a Bachelor of Arts (Summa Cum Laude) from Shippensburg University.[1] Prior to entering academia, he was a professional illustrator and designer.

He's one of you who has figured out that its bullshit.