I too doubt the whole premise of the Pauline church.
The Hebrew Matthew and the Aramaic both lack the birth narrative…
Speaking of which. My girlfriend pointed out last night that Cesare Borgia had Jesus paintings made after him after I told her what we all talked about. She keeps surprising me.
Surprises me too. On reflection though, I shouldn’t be surprised. Cesare Borgia was a piece of work. If I were he, I probably have done the same, and had a few statues done of Jesus in my image. Can’t claim that of the Pieta because it was made decades after Cesare’s death.
Perhaps the most famous statue of Jesus is Michelangelo’s Pieta in St Peters. (1498-1499) Most depictions of Jesus after that time looked suspiciously like that very .Given the prejudices of the time, they couldn’t very well have Jesus looking Jewish or even foreign
The Pieta; The face of Jesus.
Pieta full view
The image below is widely accepted as being a reasonably accurrate idea of what Jesus would probably have looked like.
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So who’s the guy that made up or dreamed up “God”?
It is a generalized concept within humanity, the “superman”. The Chinese, the Greeks, name a culture, they had their “supermen”.
Probably some bloke in the paleolithic, if not far earlier.
Seems to me that humans have pretty much always had an urge to the divine. That believing in things greater than oneself meets some very important human needs. These include helping to deal with the fear of death, giving a sense of meaning, purpose and control where non exists. Providing a sense of community. Even today being part of the dominant religious community can be a matter of life or death.
It is also my position that religious beliefs probably have or at least had, an evolutionary benefit. Even today, around 85% of all humans have some kind of religious belief.
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The intellectual basis of the origin of religions and their continuance seems to me to have always had this basic logical fallacy somewhere . That fallacy is called ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ (after this therefor because of this)
EG Then: Shaman prays and has a dance ,begging for rain. Rain comes the next day. Obviously it was the Shaman’s prays and dance.
Today the most common example is perhaps miracles. Person has disgusting disease. Goes to Lourdes, prays to the virgin for her intercession with god and drinks from the holy spring. Disgusting disease goes away.Obviously a miracle through the intercession of the Virgin with god. The millions, tens of millions of equally or more worthy prayers not answered are ignored. This is called ’ confirmation bias’
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Bernadette Soubirous, the 14 year old French peasant, had her hallucinations of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1858. Since that time, pilgrims to Lourdes are perhaps over 100 million. Of all of those desperate, suffering people, the Catholic Church recognises a total of 65 miracles. There have been no recorded regrowth of missing body parts, not so much as a foreskin.
PS the general rate of spontaneous remission is 1:30,000.
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Me and the middle kid were talking about the “supermen” of old mythology. He kinda liked that their gods were more “human” (with faults).
We imagined being the first to think of unexplainable events…
Sitting around the fire 
, it rains - poof fire goes out 
. BUT 
when it rains there is a fire 
in the sky that rain cannot put out!!! There would have been no explanation for this contradiction- Thor and his children…(example).
You might enjoy “Ragnarok” on Netflix. It’s the Norse gods against the Giants.
And no, that is not the name of two hockey teams.
PS I haven’t really been following the plethora of Marvel films Just as well, I just found out that superman gets killed and was very upset. He was my favourite comic and radio super hero when I was about 6. Batman, not so much. Probably too sophisticated. Have always thought he should be killed off and replaced with a younger bloke, like The Phantom for over 300 years. .
Because the human mind is dissatisfied with uncertainty and will leap to invent cause when one is not apparent. It is a well document psychological phenomenon. We EXPECT patterns. We EXPECT divine agency. It’s an argument from ignorance “I don’t know, I’d rather not find out, therefore God.”
Just so. It’s called confirmation bias.
Yes. Or " I lack the knowledge, imagination or wit to think of anything else, therefore god (or aliens) did it" I think that’s also called ‘god of the gaps’
Seems to me that very few people ever seriously question the beliefs and world view they absorbed uncritically, before the age of seven. I agree that many do not want to know, terrified of being jolted out of their complacency. Common in religion, politics and (in Australia at least) sports.
Religious faith, formed without actually knowing cannot survive even casual scrutiny using reason and facts.
Simple question, avoiding the existence of god; Why is there evil and suffering? Watch them squirm.
Primitive man, just like ourselves, do want answers. But the answers back then were most likely derived from misconcetions, made-up folklore, and just plain bullshit. Most wrong. But as our science and understanding advanced, we replaced those folk tales with verifiable and rational answers. Why is there lightnening? The gods in the sky (or mountain tops) were having a party. Now we know that friction between particles in the sky generate static electricity, eventually discharging to a lower potential.
Most people do not have issue with such answers. But in religion, they cling to those same old stories, as if they were valid and true. We now know this Earth is not held up by a god or something else, we know it is an oblate spheroid circulating out sun, bound to it by gravity.
Religions is slowly experiencing a loss of those old answers.
There is also another answer, and it stems from childhood and school. One is expected to know the answers, everyone is expected to raise their hand when the teacher asks a question. Children are chastised when they say “I do not know”, when that may be the best course of action, the honest one.
We witness this all the time from apologists, when we are asked such questions as “where did the universe come from?” They pounce on the honest answer of “I do not know” treating this answer as a shortcoming and a failing, then attempting to shoehorn in “But I know, god”.
They believe bullshit trumps honesty.
Yair, at least in organised religion and politics.
What is the deal with animal suffering?
I’m going to need more sorry?