Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up.

[Prophet 451]

274. Perhaps

I would suggest that Christ exists as the collective body of the dreams and desires of Christians worldwide. That is, regardless of whether Yeshua the man existed, Jesus the Christ exists by virtue of affecting the lives of so many. Granted, that's a metaphysical, philosophical argument but I would argue that the beliefs of Christians (and I'm not, I'm a Lucferian Satanist; I worship the other guy) should be respected for the same reason and on the same grounds as those of people who are in love. Whether we happen to like the beloved or not, we are necessarily obliged to respect the strength of feeling in the lover and so, I would suggest we are likewise obliged to respect the Christian's strength of feeling. With that in mind, it therefore doesn't actually matter whether Yeshua the man existed since millions of Christians are going to act as if he did regardless.

I would also doubt the utility of trying to convince them that they are interpreting their Bible wrongly. The psychological biases of humanity means that, not only will they reject your interpretation, they will resent you for having informed them of it. I strongly suspect that the obnoxious assholes would be such regardless of their faith (or lack thereof, plenty of atheists being assholes too). If the professional Christians can manage to legalistically parse Jesus's words to pretend that he would oppose welfare, they can legalistically parse them to support any position they care to name.

I also think that, in many cases, they are against something just because liberals are for it. Conservatism, and Republianity (that witches brew of fundie Christianity, nationalism and fringe-right politics that exists purely to convey divine approval of the GOP platform) can now be best understood as blind spite. We saw that with the "Rolling Coal" fiasco. They disbelieve in global warming, not because they misunderstand the evidence but because they don't care about the evidence. If liberals are for it, they're against it. End of story.