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There may be "religious" people who embrace evolution, too, but if you are atheist, you got nowhere else to go. The fact is that if you believe in God, you don't need evolution. it is wholly irrelevant. If, however, you don't believe in God, you're going to need to cook up some kind of rationale for the very inescapable fact of everything that exists --including intelligent observers of that fact.

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@Disgod&quot;It helps keep things simple. It removes a lot of text from the page, generally don't but in a debate with a person I disagree with I just keep going.&quot;Completely understandable.&quot;You have yet to explain how we can know about other religious sects growing in that exact same region...&quot;You have strict criteria for believing that Jesus existed.. Are you analyzing historical information for these sects with that same critical eye?Yes, we've both been focusing on Pliny quite a bit. Even if Pliny would have acknowledged Jesus (or the events around his death) because he heard about Jesus from others, it wouldn't meet your criteria as a valid source because its second-hand knowledge.Jumping back awhile in the discussion.. Mainstream scholarship does believe that Jesus existed: <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_myth#Chart&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_myth#Chart&lt;/a&gt;

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That's the really cool thing about the religion of evolution... It's non-disprovable. When evidence comes out against it, the digger trolls bury it and the scientists ignore it. When that evidence becomes overwhelming, non-sensical &quot;explanations&quot; are given for how this really proved the prior theory, but it needs a bit of tweaking. Still no explanation for the Cambrian explosion. Still no explanation for mitochrondial DNA. Still no explanation for ... DNA and RNA and the mechanism for gene transfer. Still no useful critique's of Darwin's Black Box (my personal conversion tool from mindless evolutionary religion), other than the personal attacks which are coming my way shortly.

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Hello Disgod:Just some quick comments on some of your responses:The &quot;Acts of Pontius Pilate&quot; that is preserved to this day is not considered to be the original document that Justin Martyr referred to. It is likely a distortion of the earlier document, but the fact that it exists would strongly indicate that there was a famous document that bore that name and upon which the later document was based, whether loosely or not. Yes, the one we have to this day was probably written many centuries later, but the one Martyr referred to would fall in line with the regular &quot;Acts of&quot; respective governors that were made with the consultation of those governors at the time of their administration.No, Tacitus did not get it wrong. The term &quot;procurator&quot; was used by several ancients to describe anyone who was below the official governor of a Roman province and who was, thus, his chief assistant or one of his chief assistants. Josephus also referred to Pilate as a &quot;procurator.&quot; The term &quot;prefect&quot; is simply a more precise term to indicate his position and would also include one who was a chief assistant to the official legate of a province, and this term was only revealed to modern scholars somewhat recently with the discovery of ancient inscriptions that bore that title. Both terms are correct, &quot;prefect&quot; is simply more specific.Other than that, my whole purpose here was to show that based on the evidence, it has to be concluded that Jesus was, at the least, an historical figure who influenced the lives of many people. It is understandable why many would question the claims that are made about him in the New Testament since if the claims are true, he was a one-of-a-kind character who had no precedent and, thus, would be one who is hard to accept according to what we are used to accepting as part of reality. But since you have already acknowledged above that you do consider the possibility that he was an historical figure, my purpose seems to be finished here. I don't suppose that I could put forth any arguments that could convince someone that the claims made about him in the New Testament must be true, but if one first does conclude that he was an historical figure, I can only say that it would be good to proceed from that starting point and then deeply consider why so many who were so close to him did believe those claims, which were so contrary to what they previously knew and what they could have come up with themselves, based on their former religious upbringing, and then those individuals were willing to devote their whole lives and even die for him, supporting that he died and rose again from the dead so that by believing and trusting in him, they could be saved to the very end. But as the other debater said, this understanding of him can truly only come by faith. I just don’t think that it is a “blind” faith as so many allege, if they look hard into all that is evidenced concerning him, but I know many will think it to be “blind,” nevertheless.

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good point Yage

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Ooooh, let's flip this one around:Atheists, you say you know that God isn't real, but you don't. You have a lack of faith, not knowledge. You have no evidence that He doesn't exist, you can't show anybody else how to reliably disprove Him, and there's no way to prove that you're right.Lack of faith and knowledge aren't the same thing.

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