Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman

That's how I view it as well. For me, the existence of Jesus is really a minor question which I am more than happy to agree to just for the sake of argument. The real questions surround the supernatural claims made by the New Testament authors.

I am willing to be more generous than that. Religious belief is also driven by personal (subjective) experience and faith. I am one who believes that the human experience involves both the subjective and objective, so I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with religious belief/faith. I am not one who requires humans to be Vulcans and adhere to some universally applied true logic and objectivity. All I would ask is that people be honest about what can be objectively demonstrated and what can not.So if people believe in God because of subjective emotions, experiences, and faith, all the more power to them. I absolutely support peoples' rights to pursue those beliefs. I would just ask for the same respect for those who don't believe.

I do have to say that the uneven geographic distribution of this offering is a bit strange.One of the concepts that first made me doubt my beliefs was the question of what I would believe if I had been born elsewhere. If I was born in Iran would I be Muslim? Probably. If I was born in India would I be Hindu? Probably. It seemed to me that the truth of religious belief shouldn't be based on where you are born. That made me doubt all supernatural claims made by religions.

We could do the very same thing for every other religious text. There are Christians who have converted to Islam, Hinduism, and any number of other religions. Yes, it does. Any map will show an uneven distribution of faiths amongst the human population.

There are multiple, independent lines of evidence supporting the BBT:Evidence for the Big Bang | The Schools' Observatory No assumption is being made. It is a conclusion based on objective evidence.

Since historians disagree with one another I don't think you can blame us.Speaking for myself, I see no reason to reject the claim that Jesus was a historical person. Joseph Smith and Muhammad were definitely historical people, yet I don't see orthodox Christians converting to those religions based on those facts.

We don't need to know where the universe came from in order to conclude that the universe began as a dense region of energy that expanded outwards. In the same way, we don't need to know where energy and matter came from in order to understand how clouds form. You might as well claim that germs causing disease is an assumption because we don't know where the energy for the universe came from. I suppose God also causes clouds and infections? Yes, there are blue shifted galaxies that are part of our local galaxy cluster due to the fact that we are all orbiting around a shared barycenter. The redshift is for galaxies that aren't gravitationally bound to the Milky Way or our galaxy cluster. We know exactly what temperature it was and what the energy came from. Once the universe expanded to the point where the energy density dropped to levels that allowed atoms to form from plasma, light was finally able to move through the universe without being absorbed by the plasma. This is the moment the CMB was produced. We know both the temperature and the cause of the CMB, and it is further evidence by the power spectrum of the CMB which is consistent with black body radiation. I don't see you providing any predictions on the relative isotope makeup of that matter. The BBT does make those predictions.

Correct. Whether a person actually existed in the past doesn't have much relevance to the claims made about their lives. George Washington existed, but we know the story about the cherry tree was invented for his political campaign.