God or no god ... where's the evidence?

that means something was always there(if dontwin2easy is correct when he says"nothing comes from nothing")
so all we have to do is think of something always was and always will be.

hell i don't know, im just quoting that bloke from stratford

Whatever but it doesn't prove there is a god.

I think we are getting down to an answer for the opening poster.
we have it down to one thing.
ITS SOMETHING THAT WAS ALWAYS THERE.IT CREATED THE UNIVERSE.IT STILL CONTROLS THE UNIVERSE AND IT HAS TO BE AN INTELLIGENT FORCE.
Sounds like its a god.
he he I can see it now in the headlines in all newspapers.
BETFAIR FORUMITES PROVE THERE IS A GOD.

Hallelujah praise be to the lord.

Gonna take a screen shot of that just in case.

EVERYONE TAKE A BOW,very well done indeed.
lets hope the good lord rewards us all with a few winners tomorrow.

It's the mentality that's wrong.
Just because an explanation is inconclusive it doesn't mean proof of God.
Why can't ppl accept that existence isn't some romantic concept made for your whim.

Every single time through out history the pious jumped to conclusions, realised they were wrong and shuffled their papers a bit then made exactly the same mistake again.
The constellation  of planets, earthquakes, the denouncing of anything new as work of the devil....etc etc.

It's like pavlov's dog ffs.

I know there is a distinction between a creator and religion, but there is a significant overlap due to the vast majority who believe in a creator being religious.
But 'a creator' could end up just as likely ton be a set of circumstances as it is some higher entity.

A question I'd like to as of those that believe in heaven etc is; which version of you do you believe will exist there?
I hear it time and again that people want to believe they will see loved ones again.
Well if that included elderly relatives then what form will they be in, an old version just for you?
Does that mean if you die old you remain old forever or do you get the luxury of existing at your peak, and if so you'll no doubt never recognise your own grand parents.

I'd predict the answer people will come up with will be some ethereal codswallop like 'you will be all things always'

yep. and there wont be that many to enter heaven. so if you have a family of 5 or 6...surely a few of them wont make it so how will those that do be happy?

also never understood why some of these rotten disgusting insects and other things(a few forumites) were created. i know that they are necessary for certain things but if you were a god that wouldn't matter would it. lots of questions that cant be answered. i hope the reincarnation theory is incorrect. imagine coming back as prey and being fully concious. worst nightmare

checkout mecca crane thread

Some took offence at my pun on the Mecca crane thread. Perhaps it was in bad taste but I see the irony in following a make believe character, especially in a hate filled religion such as Islam.

Why would an all seeing compassionate god destroy his house of worship and kill his flock?

RIP those poor people but this sums up the whole religion farce that this thread is about.

I glossed over most of this thread but seen fkqmz reply to my quote.

I can hardly believe what I done last week but you believe the word of people who wrote down their accounts 40 years after they happened?

History is a great subject but something that has to be put in perspective. It's usually written by the victors an has to be taken in context. The bible was written by many people, often from stories that were word of mouth or many years after the events. They were changed and rewritten many times.

I've said before, if there is a higher being then he has no bearing on my life or anyone elses. Why not remove the need for one?

why would a god say

non beleiver--go to hell

It was a poet, Edgar Allen Poe, and not a scientist who first realised that the universe was expanding and how old it must be.

A god probably wouldn't.

It does however complete the narrative to believe that one would.

Last bit of Dawkins I'll add, sums up the equation I believe.

There are two games being played at once, the long game and a short game. The long one is the game played by genes.
They determine everything about you, the length of your legs and colour of your eyes etc but they have no control on your conscience. It's explained as the analogy of sending a message through space, it has to have everything needed at the same time since it would take too long to receive responses and then return more input.
So everything is predetermined in the code of each of your cells before birth.

What isn't passed down is knowledge, you don't inherit anything in the form of information from your ancestors.
So every person starts from scratch, but are products of their environment. Their consciences are moulded by their upbringing.
So if you are taught for eg. That killing is wrong (Ten Commandments) then your conscience shapes the very environment, if you grow up in war torn depravity then killing is acceptable.
The point being you won't see the example of where the rules are different because it's self replicating in the environment where killing is mostly unacceptable, because the equilibrium is met and harmony prospers, where depravity is the norm everyone kills each other.

Can I ask for your evidence lfc? And if so where was his evidence?

Sorry, I should also have concluded....
And that is the answer to those that use the poor excuse that religion's existence being longstanding must be proof that God exists.

ovalman

There is a famous passage by Poe where he describes looking at the night sky and wondering why the light was not uniform as eg in a gakaxy. Dont remember the full details but Poe realissd the only way this could be with the sky not like the light of a gakaxy but with dark areas was if light had to travel great distances to get here and in some cases so far away had not reached here...more to it but he deduced the vast age and expanding universe before scientists

The clever thing was that Poe asked why the night sky was not a uniform brightness and then realise the scientific reason, although he was a poet and not a scientist.

nice one lfc

Eureka (1848) is a lengthy non-fiction work by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) which he subtitled "A Prose Poem", though it has also been subtitled as "An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe". Adapted from a lecture he had presented, Eureka describes Poe's intuitive conception of the nature of the universe with no antecedent scientific work done to reach his conclusions

Thanks xmoney I couldnt remember the details.

I think that's Olbers Paradox you're referring to?

ie. if light travels at an infinte speed then why is the sky dark in a finite Universe.

Never knew Poe pondered on the same question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

Olber is a bit before Poe so Poe got it from Olber

who did older get it off

olber

The clever thing is to think of the question why is the skys brightness not uniform in the first place...its a bit like being clever enough to ask why does an apple fall from a tree.

It wouldnt cross most peoples minds to ask such a silly question

Most people at one time thought that the earth was flat and were surprised to find they were wrong.

Looking out to the night sky and universe now we might expect the universe to be round..but again we would be wrong only in reverse..

The universe is likely to be flat, as flat as a piece of paper..strange that.

Is it not just down to wavelengths?
Think Fion mentioned he was a physics buff

It's a very reasonable question to ask. If light travels at an infinite speed (as was thought at the time) then why isn't the sky bright as every stars light in the Universe woul have hit us.

It's reconciled by light being finite (michelson/ Morley experiment iirc) and the Universe is expanding (Hubble). There may be more proofs but they're the 2 I can think of.

The closer you get to the source the brighter the surround due to the increase in number of wavelengths or something

how is their a beginning of time?

must be a beginning before the beginning

sounds like a julio iglesias song

The closer you get to the source the brighter the surround due to the increase in number of wavelengths or something

Inverse square law of light. If you move twice as close to a source then the brightness increases 4x. Our eyes adjust automatically and it's not common sense.

how is their a beginning of time?

must be a beginning before the beginning


There are no easy questions. If you substitute it with a creator then who created the creator? Why not save a step and go for the more simplified question?

Good morning Ovalman.
To answer your query on the inverse square law. Imagine the wave front moving out from the source. The light energy is spread over the surface of a larger and larger sphere. The ratio of the surface area of a sphere to its radius is given by the formula A=4πr^2. Area is proportional to radius squared.

How is there a beginning of time? Einstein showed that the fabric of the universe is space-time and neither space nor time have an independent existence. If the universe had a beginning then so did space-time. A strange concept I know but one which seems to fit all available data.

Physics has never fascinated me enough for me to delve into it but sometimes you have to consider parts of it that are addressed as part of other things.
I don't know where I had come to the conclusion but I was simply of the understanding that light from stars appear to us as dots because it's only a fraction of the waves that reach this distance.
The pitch of the frequency of the wave determining how far the light travels.

Though I accept that might be a million miles away from being accurate.
Fu ck it, what you supposed to do, specialise in everything?

It actually shows the problem faced with progress. To make a difference today you'd have to spend too considerable a time to get to the coal face as it were so I just think bolox to it let everyone else worry about it.

Dustybin you are right that there is so much knowledge out there that people have to specialise in order to work at the coalface.
How much of this ordinary people need to know is an open question but in reality probably not very much. How many scientists do we really need? Probably not all that many as a proportion of the total population. It's the same with university education, the pendulum has swung too far the other way of the last quarter century leaving "overqualified" people dissatisfied either with their job or with no job at all. That's another issue and nothing to do with the god question.

The question is what constitutes being a scientist I believe.
If we look at 'nature' then the abundance of genes that do no significant job but exist simply incase they are needed in future suggests that the number of individuals competent enough to tackle the bigger questions are needed in abundance.

I have a theory that perhaps 90 odd percent of humanity is at face value of little significant use though it's unwise to cull them before you think that's what I meant since they all carry the potential to provide the Einstein of the future.

Einstein himself justified everyone of his ancestor's existence.

So for a ready supply of 'wheat' there needs to be infinite numbers of 'chaff'

Here's something I can't get my noggin around regarding light.
All this looking out into space.
As you are looking back in time then it follows surely you will only ever at best see the moment minus the age of the position you view from?
So in our case unless an event lasted longer than the time it took earth to form (4.5 billion years) the light given off from it is no longer viewable from here.
It would also follow that if an event like the burning of a star or and explosion that gives off light were to be shorter then no light is viewable, and if no light is viewable then how can you determine distance?

So unless you can travel faster away from earth than it took light to arrive to an indeterminate position then it's not entirely pointless but you will only ever see so far and in an expanding universe that point gets less significant at the speed light travels?
The prospect of travelling faster than light are limited.

And at the risk of sounding very stupid indeed, there's something else I'm not sure I ever knew.

Are there not constellations of stars in all directions from this point?
If so how do you determine the best direction to look in?

Actually I suspect there will be a formula for that based on pattern of stars and probability.

The closer you get to the source the brighter the surround due to the increase in number of wavelengths or something

I think you just mean ‘waves’ in this context. You’re right. Think of a magnifying glass and the Sun. The convex character of the lens changes the direction of the photons that hit it so that they all get pointed at one spot. This is like a star backwards, the light going to a point rather than coming away from it. At the focal point the light is very hot. Nothing special happened to the photons, they just got lined up in phase by the lens, and the closer they get to the focal point the closer they all get to each other. As they combine the intensity of the light increases, but the individual photons themselves are unchanged just as if the glass wasn’t there. The rule is that two waves with the same wavelength and amplitude will double in intensity if they share the same space. The more the waves diverge as they travel from a point source, like a star, the less relationship there is between the phase of one wave and its near neighbour.

Another way to view it could be as two waves that emerge from a point, with one going downwards and travelling along the opposite of a right-angled triangle and the other moving away along the hypotenuse. Even if they start aligned, the wave on the hypotenuse soon starts to lag behind (because unlike the other wave, it is going through two dimensions, not only moving ‘down’ but also partly ‘across’). You could employ probability amplitudes. You’d imagine two ‘clocks’ each with a single hand starting at 12. One rotation of the hand equals 360 degrees of phase of the waves, so there’s one lot of these ~ per clock spin . If both waves end up at a base line, the one along the adjacent will arrive first (as it has the shortest route). The clocks spin according to the frequency of the light, so many thousands of times a second. But the one on the hypotenuse has to spin more because it has further to go. The upshot is they arrive out of phase (their clocks don’t read the same) and so the intensity is less than if you had two waves travelling down the opposite together. In that case the clocks would keep the same ‘time’ and the intensity (and the probability of you seeing the light) would be very high.

the one along the adjacent will arrive first

Meant opposite not adjacent.

I think Ill sit on that for a bit, perhaps once Ive had a swill later in the day
Does the sum total of all that mean light bends the further away from the source you get?

I have some science questions that for one reason or another were never filled in for me, documentaries have the problem of telling stuff they think is appropriate, which isnt always the thing that all of us need to know to grasp certain things.

Ill put a thread up later because it's not necessarily relevant to the god question.

It only bends as such if the the space through which it is passing is curved by a gravitational field. In the case of a lens it is the change in density between the air and glass that causes it to change direction, same as a mirage. In a mirage the light travels through the sky but when it comes near to the ground there is a layer of warm air, which is less dense, so the light changes direction and, if you are standing in the right place, comes to your eye and you see the blue of the sky. But with a magnifying class it has been deliberately fashioned so that the waves all meet at a point in the near distance.

But if light radiates out at the same speed say within a vacuum then each point it reaches given the same point is a vertex.
If the object it 'strikes' at any given moment were large enough then surely the surface of contact would be a curve?

Its immaterial though because Im not sure even if it was what good it would do

I was basing my original assessment on something Id read years ago about the wavelengths given off by everything.
The cells in the human body give different pitch wavelengths that travel different lengths based on frequency, from recollection (though Id probs have to go and read it again)
The arc at the top of the wave traveling huge distances out into space, while others dont even reach the edge of your body.

I assumed light would have been similar

mememe, for every action - there is a re-action.

Therefore, I shall shortly be making a new thread entitled, "satan or no satan...where's the evidence?"

Call it a yin-yang kinda thang ... and good luck with your theories

So this is for the opening poster.
IN THE BEGINING THERE WAS SOMETHING OR NOTHING.
IF THERE WAS NOTHING THERE WOULD BE NOTHING TODAY,BECAUSE NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING.
SO THERE HAD TO BE SOMETHING IN THE BEGINING.
THIS SOMETHING HAD TO BE ALWAYS THERE AND WILL ALWAYS BE THERE.
THE SOMETHING THAT WAS THERE IN THE BEGINING WAS NAMED GOD BY MANY PEOPLE.
YOU MAY CALL IT WHATEVER YOU WISH BUT GOD IS THE MOST POPULAR NAME USED.
so I hope you agree that something had to kick start everything,and most use the word god to describe this something.
well done opening poster,it was truly a great thread,and I hope you found the answer that you wanted.

one last point to mememe the opening poster,Albert Einstein wrote a letter in 1936 to a little girl who asked if scientists prayed.
The greatest scientist had to be careful with his answer.the letter is on the internet.under the heading "einsteins letter to Phyllis"it may explain more to you.

For the budding scientists on here,

Horizon tonight 10pm BBC4 "What time is it?"

Hopefully Prof Cox will explain the concept of space-time.

Yup...

If there is no God then where does the money go from the collection baskets?.. see ,..see.. answer that one  wise guys.

i think it pays to replace the lead nicked off the roof?

I asked Father O'Hare from my parish if God was really true, he said "he gave you that talent you have of speaking with your mouthful".... I know work as a food critic

A priest lying - who'd have thought it!

Well, if God is a carefree psychopath with no concern with the past, present or future, I'd say the evidence is pretty compelling.

Do you want to look up in the sky and see a bearded man and skywriting that says "Do you believe (y/n)" ?

Wonder how much time the early pilots spent flying around above the cloud base…..

I doubt Corbyn has a pilot's licence Kincsem.

An update from my perspective, 12 days on from asking the question ...

I don't believe in god and thought that when I raised this on the forum he or she would punish me.

I can report that except for a brief thunderstorm when we were in Whitby last weekend (and we got wet) and a slight case of athlete's foot (now cleared by some creme - I didn't bother to pray, though, I just applied the creme as directed) I have not (yet) been punished for my impertinence.

I therefore conclude that god:
1. is not concerned about me and lets me do what I like;
2. has noticed me and meted out minor punishments;
3. is waiting to unleash an almighty punishment on me (frogs, blood, etc that sort of thing);
4. quite likes me and will conjure up a big lottery win for me sometime soon;
5. does not exist.

I've gone for option 4.  Praise the lord!

But of course I could be wrong - what do wise forumites think he'll do?

Well, he's already pi55ed on you, watch out for seagulls is my advice.

what do wise forumites think he'll do?

Romans 1:28-30, speaking about humanity as 1 entity....

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

So if you wantenly cavort around not caring about God or how he wants you to live, he will give you over to your sins and allow you to live as you please. But ultimately this will result in your (spiritual) death. Good luck with that!

You quote Saul AKA St. Paul tarring everyone else with his own brush.

Romans2:1
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.

So if you wantenly cavort around not caring about God or how he wants you to live, he will give you over to your sins and allow you to live as you please. But ultimately this will result in your (spiritual) death. Good luck with that!

I actually laughed out loud at that. Evidence gathered from a book of fairy tales.
How anybody in these enlightened times can give credence to a collection of story's written over 2000 years ago by persons unknown is beyond my understanding.
Even more incredible is the fact that these 'were selected from what was available, collated and put out as the word of god.
But even more incredible than that is that people believe it.

Now I'm not saying there isn't a god, nobody can say for sure either way but what I am saying is that if there is a god he is nothing like that as depicted in the bible or as told to us by men who dress funny.

fkqmz ...

I only want him to let me win the lottery ... I'll give some to charity.

Please, god, please ... just the once, go on.

You'll be lucky mememe, he's got more important things to do. He's busy chastising homosexuals at the moment after spending the afternoon making sure some highly paid footballers who "crossed" themselves scored a goal or two.
He's also got to observe a few sessions of god's justice being carried out by the religion of peace tomorrow, after all he's the same god you know.

...just blacks up a bit

Religion is bull crap. But I personally believe God exists. Here is one of thousands of reasons I could come up with. In the old testement the book of Daniel gives a countdown to when the messiah will come into Jerusalem. The OLD TESTEMENT is a jewish book. To the very day using the jewish year, it prophesies jesus entering jerusalem over 500 years later. Jesus fulfills jewish scriptural prophecy in hundreds of instances. He over turns the roman empire. A broken man on a wooden cross over turns the roman empire.
the dead sea scrolls are carbon dated. They are jewish books. They pre date the gospels which are the christian add on. yet they both reference each other. This book is a living entity. It is not Harry Potter. It's an unfathomable mystery which is the living word of god. That sounds spooky and insane to Atheists. I know it does because I was an atheist for over twenty five years. I know all the counter arguments for atheism - But the bottom line is you are going to die. I personally would prefer that when you die you just wink out and blackness engulfs you. I find that thought reassuring. I find possible immortality very scary. All these WHY questions can be answered by reading a book that's easy to find. If you want to refuse God, then do so after reading the book. Not the TV or what others say or do. Just read the book. IT IS NOT A LITERAL BOOK. It's the work of god and it speaks to the man in the third century as well as the twenty first century. So it begins let there be light - not... let a quantum singularity manifest among a forming hydrogen cloud. These terms would be meaningless to man in the third century. IT speaks to all men, at all times. Please be aware eternity is a long time. Eighty years is nothing.

Much of that is reliant on the events regarding jesus being accurate.
Plus, what you wish to believe regarding your own existence doesnt prove it to be true.
The universe isnt what it is just because you perceive it in such a way.

IT IS NOT A LITERAL BOOK
Which could be said to be ambiguous for good reason. A book of metaphors and not fact can't reliably be disproved

How do you know the bible is the word of god Zorro? You are claiming to know something you can't possibly know. The gospels which claim that certain prophesies were fulfilled were written many years after the events they claim to record by people who were not eye witnesses. They knew of the prophesies and had an interest in making the story fit. There's not a scrap of evidence for the events anywhere but in the bible to corroborate these stories. The Romans kept very good records so why is the trial and execution of Jesus missing from them?
The bible is full of contradictions, if it were the word of God why would he make so many mistakes? Did he have a bad memory?
Just because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy to believe these stories doesn't make them true.

There is no God imo.
We are an insignificant planet in the vast Universe. Why would a so called God have anything to do with us?.....we are nothing in the great scheme of things.
The Bible is a story not fact.
We got lucky that a mixture of chemicals produced us and everything else.....nothing to do with a God.
Religion has caused more wars and violence.....is this what 'God' intended?
God is something made up by civilisations long ago that did not understand the workings of the universe. I am also still at a loss to understand why supposed intelligent people in the Clergy believe that anything written in a work of fiction can have any influence on the human race and it's existence.
If a plane crashes......many say, if one person survives 'it's a miracle'......what about the 250 others that perished then!! The fact is one person got lucky.....end of.
Is anyone seriously telling me if I go to church I will become a better person.
I give generously to many charities......this to me is what it is all about. I like to help people who have not been as fortunate as myself. They have simply fallen foul of the twists and turns of life. God is not helping them at all.
We simply have a bigger plus more complex brain that any other animal that produces thoughts where other animals are not capable of processing. To my mind religion is simply a comfort for some, and if they want to have this in their lives then I don't have a problem with this, but don't inflict ridiculous beliefs on others......let them make up their own minds.

Well we all know that there was a guy called Jesus Christ who walked this planet about 2000 years ago.
who he was I can not tell you ,some say he is the son of god.
But he give everyone a fair chance to answer this question for themselves.
he asked his followers a question"who do YOU say I am"
So I will ask you all the same question.
Who was JESUS CHRIST.feel free to give your opinion.

We are an insignificant planet in the vast Universe. Why would a so called God have anything to do with us?

There was a book called Ptolemy's Almagest. A standard Astronomical handbook used through the middle ages.

A quotation in the book reads: 'The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point.'

Therefore, scientists knew for centuries that we were a little planet in a vast universe and never did they think it had any bearing on the religious question.

Look for a clip on youtube called Religion and Science by CS Lewis. It's where I got the above from, it's very good.

I read that if the knowledge of everyones brains is contained on the top of a pin head,the knowledge that they don't understand is contained from  outside the pin head to the early universal edges,

one thing that is very strange about the human being is that they can communicate wirh each other by writing.
in other words I can pick up a pencil and paper and tell you how I feel ,I wonder if in this vast universe of ours if there is other life can they communicate in written form.

To answer the question regarding 'Jesus Christ'.
We don't KNOW that there was such a person. There are other people's accounts, but they have investment in the idea that he was Christ.
There may have been a man called Jesus from Nazareth, who was a carpenter by trade and followed the cynics and spoke philosophy to those around him (that had already been well established by his day)
What others made him out to be is more about what they wanted of him.
Just like Man Utd fans refer to Eric cantana as king Eric.

Its ambiguous, and only ambiguity remains in the absence of fact, that is why it lingers on.

I see that there are believers in Islam saying a boy pushed his mother away from certain calamity in that crane disaster the other week at the mosque.
I've seen the footage, he didn't, it was instinct and he was trying to avoid certain death, but his mother was in the way.
No doubt he will be seen as a martyr now.
Complete bobbins.

"if they want to have this in their lives then I don't have a problem with this, but don't inflict ridiculous beliefs on others......let them make up their own minds."

But you are inflicting your beliefs on others right here. How come you're allowed to do it and not others. What about freedom of speech or do you only believe in this when someone is saying something you agree with.

dustybin,you are the first person I have ever come across that doubts the existence of jesus Christ,i am not saying he was god,but half the world believe he was,and the other have say he wasent,but you are the first I heard say that he did not exist.

'Christ' is a title, it wasn't a surname.
So I'm saying there is a distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and a person believed to be the messiah.

people labeled him the Christ,but who ever he was he existed and that is why the year is 2015,its 2015 years since he was born.i am not sure but I don't think he ever claimed to be god during his life.he always said when asked who he was"who do YOU say I am"?

Anyone who comes to a conclusion about the existence of God is an idiot.

Spinoza's god.have you never heard of the proven one.

Did Jesus exist?

Apart from the bible stories there is only one other record of Jesus from the first century, written by Josephus a Roman Jew. There is controversy over this document, some say it was corrupted and a typical account is given in this link.

http://www.josephus.org/testimonium.htm

There is an article about the Testimonium on Wikipedia too as well as many other sites.

The astonishing thing for me is that there is no record of Jesus in official Roman documents of the era. The Romans were excellent at keeping records and one would have thought that having tried and executed such an allegedly conspicuous person, there would have been any number of documents were the story of him true.

and what happen 2015 years ago for them to call it the year 1.(one)?

I'm an aethist too (thanks be to god !)

and what happen 2015 years ago for them to call it the year 1.(one)?

Invention of the Catholic Church who controlled almost everything in Western Europe until fairly recently.

We now use the Gregorian calendar named after Pope Gregory XIII

but its not just the catholics that believe in jesus half the world believe.
Messi is a great footballer,half the world say he is the best ever,the other half would not agree,but in years to come nobody will say he did not exist.
Jesus must have being famous in his time,he had to be different than the run of the mill guy,and he had a lot of supporters.whatever he done or said he got half the world believing in him.Muslims believe in him as well as Christians so his fan base is fairly large.
it is difficult for some people to believe he was the son of god,but even the aethists except that the guy lived.
lets call him a historical jesus,but he still walked the earth and as far as I know he never claimed to be god.
all he did was talk about his father when he mentioned god,and someone called him the son of god,but he said he was the son of man.

You have answered your own question brassneck.

Ignoring the fact that everything was written by others with an investment, and that all is taken on the words of others rather than anything supplied to you/us personally then there remains the simply analysis regarding whether there was a persona named jesus from that area who others rightly or wrongly believed to be the son of god.
Its very likely there was such a man, that man was most likely erudite enough to understand philosophy of the day and the commentators daft enough to think he was greater than the sum of the parts.
Why are you continuing to labour the questions regarding jesus?

I saw on the news today that some of those mentioned (ie religious nutjob fanatics) being islamic (and believers that jesus wasnt who the catholics thought he was, but a prophet instead) are systematically killing atheists.
Perhaps it is time the atheists stepped up iconoclasm themselves since the rock throwers seem to think they can destroy culture.

Christ, so to speak.

I'm a devout atheist and smugly thought I'd be safe from the nutters - that they'd just kill the wrong types of muslim, some christians and possibly a couple of quakers.

Seems I'm wrong - I'm rapidly re-assessing my options, and fitting window locks.

And thinking of getting on of them pet pigs ... I hear they don't like them, well any pig, that is, but I wouldn't want a big one in the lounge and on the foot of the bed at night.
We've already got a dog so should be ok-ish.

As I said jesus never claimed to be god,and I agree with you that it was the media at the time that labeled him the son of god,i have never tried to justify jesus as god I only tried to explain that the guy existed,this point seems to annoy you,as you seen to be in denial for some reason that he did live on this earth.
my own feeling about a god existing have nothing to do with a bible god,i do believe that the universe is controlled by an intelligent force,but not one that answers to prayer or cares about the human beings on the planet,i am more favoured with a universal god of nature.
and I believe that any one who does believe in a bible god has a gift of faith and good luck to them.
provided they don't go round preaching to me about him.

I believe you have the basis of a decent theory.
But I merely give logical analysis.
I don't get annoyed but I do end up incredulous.
You base your perception of knowledge on what other tell you to think. The longer back in time the fruitier the outcome.

How can you not see the simple constant here is that Jesus existed as a carpenter of the time?
Just like the life of Brian.
The complete lunacy of the collective being greater than those erudite enough to control it.
Like all these f uckin nutters doing s hit in the name of God.
It's just punk rock adolescent theory based in resentment.

Religion is about a theory instilled on those without by those with.
Live poor and be content, while the truth is that those with permeate the lie.
Why?
Because in life 'we' all feed on others

I agree,had they not selected jesus they would have selected someone else,but the someone else would have got the same labels.

Every rich person wants religion.
They want poor people to feel at one with all.
Be content with God, with nothing but belief....and let the rest be devised between the rich

Not sure if that's clear
Basically all religion has a 'poor version' vs a rich one.
But the majority are poor, because the few reep as a result.

The sentiment that it's virtuous to struggle works beautifully for the rich because it contained competition and stops them getting lynched for taking other people's lot

the bibles that are read today where not created until the 6 century.just like all wars the winners always print the history of the war.So you can rest assured what was printed in the 6th century bibles was done to improve the controllers bank balance.

small print always read and weep