@ug i think it's debatable how much any historical figure actually existed but this is generally a well understood and thoughtfully debated point among historians

@ug i also think religion is only one of the many cases in which followers create a cult of personality which is them prone to the creation of myths. julius caesar would be another example

@ug i found this a lot recently researching history of mathematics

@ug oh yes totally

@ug i used to find this difficult to process and leaned toward the misguided view of the hypothetical atheist you describe

@ug i actually believe the cult of pythagoras may have been mythologized to a degree to retcon irrational numbers

@ug jesus is also the one i consider to be more tenuous

@ug i'm less familar with sidartha but mohammed was most definitely a guy

@ug @hipsterelectron I used to be in some online communities for people interested in biblical studies and the Jesus mythicists who would join were invariably so annoying that the mod team eventually decided to ban them all

@ug i was about to raise the point that taking a hard stance upon the reality of religious figures is much closer to what religious activists do to undermine other religions than what we might call a platonic atheist would do—but then realized this was precisely your point above

@ug @hipsterelectron the best crackpot take on Jesus is Verhoeven's he says all the miracles are there to distract us from things like the fact that Jesus and John the Baptist had beef

@ug @hipsterelectron I think a lot of that attitude too is just like this idea that anything in the first century must have twenty first century style documentation or it's fake and that's not really how ancient history works