"Anyone who professes to take the result literally is utterly and completely insane."

Ha! (grin) No they aren't, Michael. They're not insane at all. They're just rather conventional people without much imagination who took for granted something someone else told them when they were growing up (as 99% of humanity does, normally speaking) and never gave it any critical thought or real examination from that point on...

In the same way, people take all kinds of other ludicrous stuff for granted too...all kinds of bizarre political and social ideas and customs that are basically quite arbitrary. It goes on and on.

How many people question the basic assumptions of their society? How many people believe total BS just because it is considered "normal" by their peer group?

Are these people all insane? No. They are just average people, meaning they are easily programmed and manipulated by the social forces around them.

What they believe in may be insane, I'll grant that! But they themselves are not. It just hasn't occurred to them to question the status quo, that's all.

Now as for whether there was a man, "Jesus", upon whom the whole thing was based...you better frikkin' believe it, for this reason: New religions arise because of some unusual person, usually some quite remarkable person. He (or she) has to be someone who tremendously impressed a lot of people to the point where they felt it had changed their lives. Only someone like that can inspire a whole new religion to form. It doesn't happen by spontaneous combustion. It doesn't happen by accident.

The people on whom religions are founded are remarkable people. That doesn't mean they are "the one and only Son of God", it doesn't mean they are even right in what they say...but to assert that the religion of Christianity somehow came about without a living person at the beginning to inspire it in some way is, frankly, just asinine.

Buddha really existed. Lao-Tse really existed. Mohammed really existed. Joseph Smith really existed. Krishna really existed. Zoroaster really existed. All those people who began or inspired new religions (or political movements) (or any major social change) really existed...and the religions are the ripples spreading from the stones they threw into the pond of life.

What they did precisely while they were alive may or may not be provable, it may or may not be accurately recorded anywhere, but to think they didn't exist at all is just plain ridiculous....and it's a case of really blind wishful thinking on the part of the anti-religionist that rivals the babbling of the most rabid fundamentalist...because it reveals nothing but his desire to deny not just the unlikely aspects of religion, but ALL of it...and to have everything in the world fit HIS established prejudices and his comfort zone, regardless of all likelihood against it being that way.

It's as ludicrous to believe that Jesus (the man) never existed as it is to believe that the Rapture is going to come and snatch away all the chosen ones to God and leave the rest of us to perish here in the Tribulation.

It would demand a similar level of blind faith and utterly wishful thinking in both cases, in my opinion.

It just shows how far people are willing to go to have everything their way and deny everything that isn't as they would choose.