The RationalWiki has an article which attempts to argue against extra-biblical sources for the existence of Christ. The conclusion the article reaches is one that is inconclusive by saying that Jesus might have been an individual or that the story of Christ came from many different people around the same period of time. However the article used many fallacious arguments and even misinterpreted evidence to try and support its viewpoint. Below is the response I created and posted on the talk page for that article. It was never meant to be this long but the flaws were too stupid too ignore. Once again RationalWiki demonstrates how it's actually irrational.
My Response to the article:
"My favorite part is how the writers of this article actually argue against what has generally been agreed upon by scholars. The article attacks all the historical accounts which mentioned Christ by claiming that they don't argue in favor because they are minimal. This is a very flawed argument. The fact that the Christ of Christians (not Jews as the section on Pliny The Younger claims) is mentioned at all speaks volumes. Apply some logic here and it's logical to assume that these Christians (whose existence as agreed upon in the article has been documented all the way back to 60 AD) either had seen Jesus themselves back in 33 AD or had family who did hence why they began following a movement which could cost them their lives.
(What the Pliny The Younger section said:
"Pliny the Younger was a Roman official born in 62 CE. In one letter he said “Christians were singing a hymn to Christ as to a god ...” That is all. In all of Pliny’s writings, we find one small tangential reference, and not even to Christ, but to Christians. Again, notice, the absence of the name Jesus. This could have referred to any of the other "christs" who were being followed by some Jews who thought they had found the messiah."
As explained above, this argument itself is flawed because it's Christians mentioned and therefore it's their Christ - Jesus.)
The section titled "Would the Disciples die for a lie?" is fallacious and the argument it attempts is quite pathetic actually. The example it lists of "people killing themselves for a belief" such as modern-day suicide bombers and their "promise" can't be used in comparison to the early Christians who gave up their lives only a few decades after Christ. One can argue people didn't live very long back then for a witness of Christ to be alive in 60 AD but then again, there were quite a few who would live to 40 - 50 years back then and 45 years was the average life expectancy according to the shorter life span myth. So according to the shorter life span myth, witnesses to Jesus would have been alive in 60 AD not only to give up their lives but to preach to others about what they saw and tell their children (who would have no reason to doubt their fathers/mothers) so this article is debunked by the oral fact itself. Paul would need great evidence to convince people to die for something that was a lie and people wouldn't follow one man's hearsay unless they had seen this man before. The outside Biblical evidence in this article plus the numerous martyr accounts (again the "Would the Disciples die for a lie?" section fails here because it almost attempts to boast that all the true martyr accounts - as documented by contemporary records - are lies because of a few hoaxes and lies) show there was a movement before Paul's involvement and more than one man could start (due to how quickly it spread and the countries it spread to. By this reasoning alone it becomes clear that more than one man/woman was behind the movement and you would have to be pretty illogical to believe this formed from a lie initiated by one man. The alternative would be to believe in a conspiracy theory where a group came together to spread the lie but you would have to be pretty dead-set on not believing in Jesus and ignoring all evidence to believe that a baseless lie could go far. It's more logical to assume - based on the speed of the spread - that entire scores of people preached about Jesus because they had seen him).
(What the "Would the Disciples die for a lie" section said:
"Argumentum ad martyrdom is often used by Christians to try to prove that Jesus was not only real, but also the messiah. The Apostles would have had firsthand knowledge whether Jesus was the savior or not, and were willing to die since they knew the truth.
However, this argument is fallacious and does not address historicity in any way. People throughout history have, in fact, died for beliefs which turned out to be false, deceptive, or poorly understood, such as suicide bombers being rewarded with virgins. Just because these men so firmly believed their beliefs were true that they were willing to die for them does not give their beliefs any credibility. More refutations to this argument exist.
Another explanation is that some martyrs were not actually sincere, that they professed Christian ideals but were actually engaging in a form of "suicide by cop." For example, during the Diocletianic Persecution, when possession of the Bible was outlawed, many people boasted that they had copies of it; the Church specifically proscribed such people from being honored as martyrs.
But even that is making the generous assumption that the martyrs in question even existed. Some Christian writers are known to have fabricated martyr-stories out of whole cloth; the hagiography of St. Catherine of Alexandria, for example, is a partial rip-off of the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, the pagan philosopher who was skinned to death with tiles (by Christians!) because people thought she had bewitched the city governor into not attending church."
As explained above this section uses flawed reasoning and misinterprets and ignores the facts. The section refuses to acknowledge that people who saw Jesus would have been alive in 60 AD and also ignores the accounts of the martrys who were Christian martyrs and had contemporary evidence for their existence.)
Back to the shorter life span myth and this myth has "no basis in scientific fact" according to a 2009 article by Livescience titled "Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years". Therefore it's likely to assume that there were likely a great few alive in 60 AD who had seen the individual Christ who was crucified back in 33 AD (as reported by several historians) and lived to preach about it 28 years later. This alone destroys most of the argument within this article.
Here's the link to the article from Livescience:
http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-constant-2-000-years.html
The conclusion I gather from this article is that it's extremely atheistic biased. It admits there was likely a historical basis for Jesus but can't even decide if it was an individual or many people.
"What most historians and scholars think is that a human named Jesus was the seed for the Christian myths."
A poor misinterpretation of what has actually been said about Jesus. This section then goes on to dispute against scholars if they are theologians because they are bias. Just as bias as the atheist then who wrote this article. If we can ignore what a scholar says about Jesus because they are religious (and there are actually atheist/agnostic/non-religious scholars who do agree an individual called Jesus existed and that he preached and was later executed) then we can ignore what this article says about Jesus because it has an atheistic bias.
(What the Tacitus section said:
"There is no other historical confirmation that Nero persecuted Christians. There certainly was not a “great crowd” of Christians in Rome around 60 CE, and the term “Christian” was not in use in the first century. Tacitus is either doctoring history from a distance or repeating a myth without checking the facts. Historians generally agree that Nero did not burn Rome, so Tacitus is in error to suggest that he would have needed to blame Christians in the first place.")
This section about Tacitus claims he's wrong about what happened in 60 AD and that there "wasn't a great score of Christians back then". How can this article make that claim without any evidence of its own? Were the writers of this article alive back then to know if Tacitus was repeating something from a untrustworthy source as it proclaims? No. Therefore the writing of Tactius mentioning the Christian's crucified founder - CHRIST - holds more value than a baseless assumption from an atheist who wasn't even around back then to get the oral/written accounts of what had happened back in 60 AD.
This article contains so many fallacies that it's not even funny. I came here looking for a non-biased account of Christ but got an extremely biased version grossly misinterpreting the facts and cherry-picking.
With that said, my short and wasted trip to this wiki is finished. I never meant to write a long essay like this but there you go. One thing has been gained though, I have now found the source behind most atheistic arguments against Jesus and debunked them."
I think we can safely say that RationalWiki's little atheistic biased article attempting to argue against the existence of Christ just got debunked.
