'There is a paradox that Jesus did all these amazing things and taught all these amazing things yet no one heard of him outside his immediate cult for nearly 100 years.
'Or it means he didn't do all these things at all.
'The first gospel of Christianity appears to have been a literary allegory that were written decades after the time they portray.
'I believe that Christianity started as one of the many mystery faiths that appeared at the time where old Gods and old traditions were rebooted.
'Christianity appears to have been a Jewish mystery faith.
'By the time of Paul there appears to have been plenty of different "Lord's suppers" as he complains about the existence of other gospels and messiahs.
'It appears that early Christianity managed to take the stories from these other faiths and incorporate them into the story of Jesus.'
Mr Fitzgerald said: 'There is nothing implausible to think that Jesus was a real person, but I just don't think that he can have been a single person if he existed at all.
'We also have no mention of Jesus in other historical texts from the time. There were certainly people writing about Judea at the time like Philo of Alexandria.
'During this period there were many other messiahs and wannabe messiahs who did far less exciting things than Jesus, but all of them managed something Jesus did not - to make a dent on the historical record.
'Two billion people believe all these miracles happened yet there is no evidence they did.'
If you are anything like me you have probably heard most of these arguments before. In fact a number of them have appeared right here on IM many times in the past.
However there have been new discoveries since I first started writing here, such as the fact there is no archeological evidence to support the exodus from Egypt, Egyptians never even kept Jews as slave, increased scrutiny of the Bible, and new questions about the historicity of Jesus, all of which is being disseminated at an ever increasing rate over the internet.
It seems that each new scientific revelation takes us further and further away from the Biblical explanations provided to us by our Sunday school teachers.
I personally have been working on a post that would demonstrate the logical infallibility supporting the idea of the supernatural. In a nutshell since everything that can be observed, weighed, or quantified is by definition a part of the natural world, then everything, regardless of how miraculous or magical is may seem, is simply a natural phenomena that we have not yet managed to put under our metaphoric microscope.
Remember the Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Magic is just science that we don't understand yet."
With that realization in mind one can simply no longer entertain the possibility of a supernatural entity being responsible for ANYTHING. Therefore no gods, and of course no son of said gods.
I actually have no problem with the idea of faith, I just believe it to be displaced.
We are far better served to direct our faith not toward the gods of mythology, whether Christian or otherwise, but rather towards humanity. Because ultimately it is faith in what we can achieve together that will ensure our survival as a species.
And I believe to survive as a species we are going to have to suppress our need to identify our differences, be they gender, race, religion, or geographic location, and instead see ourselves as one people, on one planet, looking toward a shared vision for our future.
