I agree.There are those who might say Jesus'intention was not to start a religion but rather that he was of his time and place and wanted the Jewish people to get back to what he viewed as the essence and core of the religion,rather than the corrupted and institutionalised form it had taken...

Other men (sorry I disagree with you about Son of God etc) subsequently started a new religion...

I have nothing but respect for people who can look at scientific fact in the face and ignore it.

I pointed out on another thread that a mainstay of the christian faith is that the Earth is about 6000 years old.

It isnt. It is billions of years old.

Thats Genesis discounted as codswallop with out even breaking out the big guns.

Thing is I dont see anymore evidence that the bible is real, than there is for fairys at the bottom of your garden.

As forthe big question about God, I don't know. I would like to think the universe is not just a fluke and that some one/thing is trying to keep it all going. But the bible ..nope not having it.

"It's not the bullet that's got my name on it that concerns me; it's all them other ones flyin' around marked 'To Whom It May Concern.'"

In fairness, to the bible and Genesis, at no point does it state the age of the earth. That's a Christian Fundermentalist assertion, generated by simply counting up the age of everyone in the bible. Its largely considered bollocks by almost every Christian sect and movement.

As for Fairies at the bottom of the garden, that's a 18th/19th century invention. The real faeries are a lot less benevolent and friendly than those of the Romantic / Victorian revival.

Indeed the origins of British faeries lies in the mythological 'gods' (for want of a better name) of the original British Celtic tribes - As the Tuatha De Dannan, who with the coming of the Milesians, retreated to their sloughs beneath the ground and to the land of the eternal young (Tir Na Nog), becoming the Dannan Sidhe. They were worshiped as the spirit of places and occur throughout mythology (interestingly preserved by the early Christians, who saw them as evidence for the age of the Nephilim in Genesis).

There are of course parallels to older tales of faeries and UFO abduction experiences.

Of course, I don't actually believe in either, but I do find mythology fascinating. Like the idea of God, Jesus, Thor etc I think it ties heavily into an aspect of human psychology that's been largely ignored and passed over in the rush towards 'scientific objectivism' and the false separation of self from the world around us, is a fallacy. The supernatural and spiritual worlds have a reality of their own, in which they are at the very least real experiences of the people experiencing them (all existence and reality is experienced subjectively).

And there is something more to existence than just hard cold science, we all experience it, and we lose something of that in the reduction of the experience to what we can pretend to objectively measure.

That psychedelic experience has important parallels to religious experiences, that doesn't dismiss the validity of those experiences, it enhances them. The problem has been that science has always stopped short at trying to explore what it cannot explain - Even though some of the real break throughs in modern neurology came from parapsychology research (most notably in perception and how the body identifies itself in relation to the world).

An open mind, to the possible, whilst remaining firmly routed in the probable, is a good way to proceed.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

Mythras I think they borrowed/stole. The early church had a problem, firstly they were dealing with a still largely pagan society in Rome, and secondly they knew very little about Jesus. So they did what the Roman empire had been doing for centuaries, they borrowed and collated what they knew with the now popular mystery cults of Mythras (and used the 25th as that was also the birthday of Zoroastra). Mythras to Christmas etc (the same applies to easter, which comes from Ester which survives in its rabbit connection).

The early Christian church simply was doing what the Roman Empire had done when conquering nations, adapting their beliefs into their own and adopting its peoples gods (for example, Minerva is a Roman Goddess adopted from the British Celts).

And there in lies the problem, this created the basis for the idea of a singular religion from which the militant faith of the Catholic Church emerged, rather than the previous 'churches', ultimately leading to the establishment of 'one true faith' (never actually the case), and about 1600 years of trouble and unnecessary strife.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]