don't you wish Jesus were real?

[Return of the Mack]

No, and I'll have to go with a point my old friend Christopher Hitchens made many times. 

If Jesus the son of God were real, then that would mean that for the entirety of human existence before he appeared about 2,000 years ago, God watched upon endless suffering of early humanity in life and the afterlife (if I'm correct, Jesus preached no salvation without him) with complete indifference.  Then, he decides that the best way to reveal the path to salvation is to brutally sacrifice his son in the desert in front of illiterate, uneducated peasants, far away from the more advanced human societies of the time in the far East. 

It's ridiculous and awful in my opinion. 

Doesn't the bible say Jesus' death was decided before God even created the universe?  If so, God didn't "then decide", rather it was decided from the beginning of time. 

[Return of the Mack]

Doesn't the bible say Jesus' death was decided before God even created the universe?  If so, God didn't "then decide", rather it was decided from the beginning of time. 

Ok, it was all planned out... Every human born before jesus died for humanity's sin is condemned.  Still, what an awful, horrible reality.

How does it being planned out condemn every human prior to Jesus to Hell?

[Return of the Mack]

Besides, he pilfers from Plato...(ducks)

No need to duck, I'll play along:  How does Jesus pilfer from Plato?  It would seem, at least to me, that Jesus pilfered (understandably so) from the Hebrew scriptures, which Jesus claimed testified about him.

If you only examine Jesus' statements against Plato's, some similarities would appear.  But if you take Jesus' statements and compare them to the Old Testament (in other words, taking a "holistic view" of the Bible), you'll find that Jesus' teachings were pilfered from the scriptures of his day.

If the Bible claims to have been ultimately written by a single author (God), you have to use a holistic approach and examine and compare it to itself in order to understand what it is saying.  It’s the Bible’s holistic cohesion that testifies that it is from God.