Atheists have no comeback to this. If there were so many alleged messianic prophets in the times of Jesus, how come none of them formed successful cults afteir their deaths? Was it maybe because only Jesus arose from the death?

>>17773918 (OP)
Because they weren’t propagated by the Roman empire.

Religion is intellectual cowardice disguised as wisdom—the refuge of minds too weak to confront reality without cosmic babysitters yet too arrogant to admit their ignorance. The religious believer represents peak midwit pathology: sophisticated enough to recognize life's fundamental meaninglessness and mortality's finality, but psychologically too fragile to accept these truths without retreating into elaborate fantasy systems about invisible sky parents who validate their existence. They've transcended the hunter-gatherer's honest relationship with uncertainty but lack the intellectual backbone to construct meaning through reason alone, instead demanding that the universe care about their personal comfort and provide them with eternal significance they haven't earned.

The religious mind exhibits the worst of both intellectual extremes—the simple person's gullibility combined with the sophisticated person's capacity for self-deception. These are people who can perform complex reasoning when it serves their predetermined conclusions but immediately abandon logical standards when confronted with evidence that threatens their psychological security blanket. They've weaponized intelligence in service of stupidity, using their cognitive abilities not to discover truth but to construct increasingly elaborate rationalizations for believing what they desperately need to be true. The religious believer is essentially a grown adult who still needs bedtime stories about cosmic justice and personal immortality, too emotionally stunted to find meaning in finite existence and too intellectually dishonest to admit they've chosen comforting lies over difficult truths. They represent the failure of human reason—smart enough to know better, too weak to do better.

>>17773923
The Roman Empire made christianity the state religion in the 4th century. That's 300 years of christian history. They had to come from somewhere, cults don't spawn out of thin air.

>>17773924
Your post says more about you than it does about religious people. Lole

>>17773918 (OP)
>maybe it was because magic
maybe it was because the rabbi legends are true

>>17773918 (OP)
John the Baptist did and his cult still survives to this day.
Shimon ben Yochai was massively influential and even had it claimed about him that he surpassed even the Torah and created/inspired the system of esoteric Jewish magic of Kabbalah that lasts to this day.

The difference with Jesus is his amenability to the Greeks that learned about his cult and who found it easy to link and mutate with their concepts of religion and the divine.
While Jesus was a Rabbi, he wasn't all that interested in deep rabbinical practice and reference and more focused on preaching his novel (fairly conservative) theology. This meant that foreigners could see his stuff and not be bogged down to references to ancient religious legalese and technicalities.

If Islam isn't true why is it successful?

If Mormonism isn't true why is it successful?

If Judaism and Zionism isn't true why is it successful?

There have been thousands of people claiming to be messiahs throughout history with varying success and claims of miracles

>>17773918 (OP)
>Jesus arose from the death
So what you mean is that his followers carried on his mission. The flesh he rose up in is the flesh of his followers.

>>17773924
You have no memory of any kind of past life. So you sprang from nothing, and will die, and become nothing again. If you sprang from nothing once, it's possible you could do it again.

>>17773923
Fpbp, proselytes are so damn pathetic on this board, get better arguments

>>17773918 (OP)
>cult of delusional people persist in their lies due to delusions
That is the weakest fucking argument I have ever heard. The Heaven's Gate believers insist they still went off to a UFO. Am I to believe that their story is true because they persist in it? My toddler is still insisting that he didn't take a bite out of his sister's cupcake yesterday despite me watching him do it with my own eyes. According to your argument, I should believe him since he keeps telling me the same story.

I swear to Christ, 99% of apologetics are written by the same type of morons who believe that card tricks really are legitimate magic. Like, how do you read that argument and not instantly know that it's logically vapid?

>>17773918 (OP)
The existence of tons of messianic prophets makes it highly likely that one of them would form a successful movement.

>>17774917

You dont know anything about the resurrection.

The atheist argument you shared is a classic strawman: it attacks the idea that people’s persistence in belief can be evidence for something, by comparing it to clearly false or delusional beliefs (like Heaven’s Gate or a toddler lying).

But here’s the key difference: the claim about the resurrection is not simply “people believed it, therefore it’s true.” Rather, it’s that the early disciples endured persecution, torture, and death because they genuinely believed they had witnessed the risen Jesus — an event that radically transformed them.

Would people willingly die for a known lie or an easily debunked myth? History shows that people die for what they believe to be true. If the resurrection was fabricated or a delusion, it’s extremely unlikely that all these followers would maintain such conviction under threat of brutal execution.

In contrast, many other religious or cultic beliefs — like Heaven’s Gate — never had the kind of historical footprint or the eyewitness testimony, corroborated by multiple sources, that the resurrection has.

Finally, unlike a toddler’s denial, the resurrection is supported by historical documents written close to the time of the events, multiple independent attestations, and empty tomb accounts that skeptics struggle to explain.

So the argument is not “belief persistence = truth,” but “the extreme commitment of the early followers to this claim, combined with historical evidence, strongly supports the resurrection’s authenticity.”

>>17773930
>cults don't spawn out of thin air.
They do to this day on social media of all places.

>>17773918 (OP)
How is this possible to believe in this crap today? It's astonishing that you still engage with those retarded tales obviously written by men

>>17775836
Heaven's Gate cultists literally dehydrated themselves to death lying in bed over the course of days for their beliefs. They suffered immensely over this lie.