re: Is this how atheists think Christianity started?

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Mark I believe is the earliest of the gospels and it was believed to be written in 140 AD

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140 AD would be inaccurate, being as all the writers of the gospels were obviously alive at the time of Jesus.

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I think this is why I tend to have such a hard time understanding many Christians. If Christians believe what they claim to believe, the question should be a no brainer: temporary pain in return for eternal bliss. And if the apostles can't reasonably be expected to believe after everything they saw firsthand, I'm not sure how anyone can reasonably believe anything at all. And the reality is that, if one believes the Gospels, the apostles had absolutely zero faith or belief whatsoever, in spite of the fact that they were given orders of magnitude more evidence than the average modern person could ever dream of having.

It's not uncommon in online discussions for someone to ask me what it would take for me to believe in god/Christianity/etc. A common ask is whether I would believe if I personally witnessed a miracle. Yet, the apostles allegedly all witnessed miracle after miracle, and yet, they still didn't believe. Strange when one really thinks of it, don't you think?

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From a Christian perspective, the issue wasn’t that the disciples had no belief at all, it was that their belief was easily overwhelmed by fear. What changed everything was the Holy Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit who empowered the disciples, giving them courage and sustains believers in the faith even today. Immediately after the crucifixion, they had not yet received this empowerment, so fear and self-preservation dominated their response.

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I don’t know that early church fathers would constitute secular authorities. If you have any specific citations to contemporary secular authorities,

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I think outside of the church the only account is Josephus‘ account of the death of James.

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140 AD would be inaccurate, being as all the writers of the gospels were obviously alive at the time of Jesus.

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Most scholars believe the Gospel of Mark was the first of the four Gospels to be written. They typically date it shortly after AD 70, largely because of the detailed prophecy in Mark 13 about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which they interpret as having been written after the event occurred in 70 AD.

However, if one accepts that Jesus genuinely prophesied the Temple’s destruction, then Mark could easily have been written earlier, potentially in the 50s or even late 40s AD. Once supernatural prophecy is allowed as a real possibility, there is no firm external evidence forcing a post-70 date.

A date as late as 140 AD is effectively impossible, as Papias of Hierapolis, a bishop in Asia Minor writing before that time, clearly references Mark’s Gospel.

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He also mentioned James, the brother of Jesus. It's not surprising he didn't mention the apostles in his writing since, at the time, Christianity was still a pretty small population and I don't know why that would matter anyway. Not everyone of value is always mentioned and there would be no need to reference specific people preaching about Jesus since Josephus, and Tacitus, reference Jesus and Christians existing. Pliny the Younger wrote a letter to At best in the eyes of Roman writers the apostles were a sect of Judaism and no different than any other cult in the empire so why would they write about them?

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I’m not saying it’s surprising; I’m saying we have functionally zero disinterested accounts of the lives and deaths of the apostles, so citing self serving accounts of their grand faith and sacrifice isn’t particularly persuasive to non-believers, which is why little skits like the OP are meant to galvanize the in group against the out group by creating a caricature of the out group.

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the atheist I encounter whether it be my friends or people at a party, they want to just live their own life, for them. Have no accountability for their actions or what they choose to do.

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That makes no sense.

Atheists are accountable to themselves, their families and society as a whole. They don't think they are above the law, although they may scoff at laws that are obviously based on religion, like no alcohol sales on Sunday.

If they had no sense of accountability, then they'd all end up in prison.

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Christians believe in 1 miracle. God always existed. If you believe that the rest makes complete sense. You have hundreds of prophecy’s fulfilled. In Job you have God mentioning “springs in the oceans” we didn’t know that till 1800s. He talks about where wind comes from, we didn’t know that either then. You have the tribe of Light mentioned in Numbers and the exact number of people is the speed of light. You have lineages of kings predicted. The Dead Sea Scrolls had verses of the Bible which line up exactly with what we previously had. You look at all the references in the Old Testament to Jesus coming, being born exactly where it was predicted. Yes the Bible was written and translated from different languages so some of the words can get lost. But when you talk to scholars who go back and read the original language they tell you how freaking close it is. I think my favorite argument I get lately is “yeah well the Bible has several stories just like other religions. Other creation stories, floods, birth of a virgin, etc. So why should i believe the Bible when it copied those?” Hmmm, lots of accounts of similar things tells me…It happened. If I see lots of drawings of men fighting bears in caves, I think there were men fighting bears... So when you hear how flood stories are depicted in Samoa/Hawaii and Asia are probably what they’ve experienced and heard from ancestors.

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Ever hear of a guy named Aristotle?

Centuries before Christianity, he was already writing about the water cycle, evaporation, and how water moves through the earth back into the sea. It wasn’t hidden knowledge. People could look with their eyes in many places and see the shite.

Same with wind. Aristotle described it as air set in motion by temperature differences. The Greeks even mapped directional winds. Are you aware sailboats existed back then, or do you think they were just drifting around hoping for the best? Turns out understanding wind patterns, and at least roughly what caused them, was kind of important if your entire trade network depended on not dying at sea.

And that’s just one guy. You also had Thales, Anaximander, and Theophrastus all writing about natural processes like water and air movement. It was a known field people were actively studying.

Now the “speed of light in Numbers” thing is a completely different category. That’s just run-of-themill huckster numerology:

Take a phrase
Assign numbers to letters
Do math operations
Scale it however you want
Land exactly on a pre-known value

I can easily find your own phone number, SSN, DOB, 420, the speed of light or any other number “encoded” in your screen name because it’s very simple to reverse engineer the target first and then build the math to land on it.

Pick the number you want. Convert the name into some base value (letters to numbers, word totals, whatever). Then choose operations and a scaling factor that force the result to match your target. You have enough degrees of freedom that you can always make it hit exactly.

The number isn’t coming out of the text. The math is being shaped around a number already decided on.

I legitimately didn't know people still believed in that shite.

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I’ll take that as a no, you don’t believe you would act that way. I don’t think you would, either

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I like to think I wouldn't.

But under pressure, man who knows?

Look at the behavior of normal arse people during Kristallnacht. That wasn't just Nazis participating, but Sunday School teachers, Bankers, and Pediatricians. . .

When a fervor hits and the pressure is on, we all like to think we are the guy that charges ahead, damn the torpedoes. But we are also just as likely to be the guy that hides, or goes along with the nonsense to keep from being the focus.

frick, even Covid showed alot of the same basic shite

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You have the tribe of Light mentioned in Numbers and the exact number of people is the speed of light.

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First, it isn't "exact" and two, the number that is close to the speed of light is the SOL in miles per second, a measure of distance not formulated until the late sixteeth century. Any reference to the mile in the Bible would have been 8 furlongs (from the Greek milion) and been even farther from the exact 186282.

If this is what moves you to belief, then Nostradamus should be really high on your list.

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I like to think I wouldn't. But under pressure, man who knows? Look at the behavior of normal arse people during Kristallnacht. That wasn't just Nazis participating, but Sunday School teachers, Bankers, and Pediatricians. . . When a fervor hits and the pressure is on, we all like to think we are the guy that charges ahead, damn the torpedoes. But we are also just as likely to be the guy that hides, or goes along with the nonsense to keep from being the focus. frick, even Covid showed alot of the same basic shite

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While I get you in theory, these motherfrickers experienced miracles. They saw a man raised from the dead. They saw food multiply before their eyes. Peter walked on fricking water. Himself. Personally. There’s a huge gulf between “I’m a human who acquiesced to shitty things” and “I have experienced literal miracles, but frick that, I don’t know that dude.”