The Jesus Delete., page 1

I'd say multiple causes, all with different purposes, but all leading to one conclusion: Jesus must never have existed.

First are the atheists. I've debated many of them, and the single thread that runs through the debates is that the Bible is some sort of fairy tale created by a writer who was either bored or extremely imaginative. The typical tactic is to simply discount anything that remotely suggests any truth in the Bible as unreliable. I even had one debate in which the other person tried to use a quote from the DaVinci Code as fact just after declaring the entire Bible as fiction. The DaViinci Code is a fiction work as specified by the author. The apparent purpose is to relieve themselves of any responsibility for not gaining a deeper understanding of the principles involved, or to permit a lifestyle they don't feel comfortable with when the Bible is taken under consideration.

The over-believers: The people who, through some misguided ideal of others, usually their parents, were spoon-fed Christianity until they gagged on it at some point in their lives, usually when they were young. They do not see the religion as anything other than a conformist machine that attempts to brainwash others, since they feel it happened to them that way. To rid the world of Jesus, to them, is to rid the world of tyranny. These have my deepest sympathy.

The scientists: I tend to view these as arrogant, believing they and they alone, by benefit of some sort of special understanding of the physical world, have an answer for everything that happens. There is simply no room in their minds for the concepts of physical science to co-exist with the idea of a spiritual faith. Jesus, if He lived, would be something they could not explain physically; therefore Jesus must not have lived.

Power-mongers tend to desire power over others. The ability to control another human is difficult to attain when that other human has a spiritual belief. A prime example of this problem lies in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". If rights are endowed by a creator, no man may remove them. So there must not be a c reator, and therefore must not be His son Jesus.

And the last group I call the truth-seekers. These are those who seek a deeper understanding of spirituality, but as was mentioned by AshleyD, the search can become too cumbersome and tiring for them. They tend to take a more 'ala carte' approach to religion, selecting a few bits here and a few bites there, until they come up with something that seems to work in their experience. They don't necessarily denounce Jesus as a group, until someone points out the error of their ways, at which point Jesus, in their minds, becomes a stumbling block to their perfect little utopia.

All of these groups tend to want Christianity to disappear, because it in some way is an unscalable obstacle to their goals. And there is one sure way to make Christianity disappear: make Jesus disappear. The other way, though less sure, is to continually preach on the evils that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, have wrought upon society. With a few omitted details there and a few incorrect but repetitious opinions here, all seems to make sense that the Christians are somehow evil... and simple logic would then suggest that perhaps the founder of Christianity itself, the Christ, Jesus, was also evil.

Watch this thread if you don't believe me; you can place every denouncer of Christianity in one or sometimes two of these groups.

TheRedneck