I don't care when exactly the Gospels and so on were penned.  They contradict each other and geographical reality and known history at many points, and are full of wonder stories that were probably made up on the spot (at least in the one attributed to Matthew), so they are not acceptable texts for historical purposes.  Things written by believers cannot be trusted regardless.

The fact is there is no reliable historian who wrote anywhere near that time of history that mentions either Jesus or a Nazareth.  The closest we have is the Christian fraud called the "Testimonium" of Josephus, and any objective observer can easily dismiss that (that so many Christians keep referring to it is testimony to their lack of real evidence).  Everything else of an objective nature dates from at least a century later.

Now it is true that absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but it is strong evidence of absence.  Mainly the point though is that to compel belief, with the idea of moral turpitude if one does not believe, should require damn strong evidence, not such a huge lack of it.

It is important to not allow believers to put the Bible into a special category of documents.  We do not believe what Homer says for no reason other than that it contains stories of gods and miracles and so on, and the same test should apply to any ancient writing.

People do stupid things all the time, like go to avalanche prone slopes or ignore warnings about floods and drive into a flooded road, or smoke all their lives.  That doesn't mean we can be judgmental and leave them to their fate -- we must nevertheless do whatever can be done.

I think the threat of Ebola to most countries is way overblown -- it has been controlled with little difficulty in Nigeria and is now in full retreat in Senegal.  Any cases in Western countries, or even in a country like Vietnam, will be quickly isolated and contacts traced and the infection stopped.  It is nowhere near as dangerous as Bird Flue would be should it ever mutate into a more easily spread infection, and the Ebola virus is not like flue in the way it mutates.

Still, I approve of the scare tactics -- they provide political cover for spending a lot of money in Liberia that would otherwise be hard to get people to support (America's racism among many groups has shown itself here pretty clearly -- they couldn't care less about Africans except where it might put them at risk).

There is a disturbing fact that would bother me more if I thought the rise of technological civilization were at all likely: the fact that we see no sign of "them" is evidence such societies have short lifespans.

Two possibilities -- maybe technology contains within itself the certainty of self-destruction, or maybe there are things we don't know about (such as other dimensions or time travel or what-have-you) that advanced societies eventually find and disappear into, leaving our cosmos.  Of course it is also possible that everyone sooner or later holes up underground in a virtual reality.

Promiscuity is often denounced.  I don't see it that way.  It may be (actually it certainly is) a waste of time and a manifestation of insecurity (a need for constant reaffirmation that one is desirable) or maybe some other similar psychology, but it in itself is not evil or a sin or even bad karma.  If it is done with the main objective being to give one's partner pleasure, then it is actually good karma.

Where it gets ugly is when it involves infidelity (one is married or engaged and one has promised fidelity), since then it becomes lying and creates the likelihood of hurting someone.  Of course it also becomes ugly when precautions against disease spread and conception are not followed carefully.

The modern college student (especially young man) in the big cities of Vietnam finds himself in a sort of candy shop, and often prudence goes out the window (I never heard of a prudent college student anyway).  Men are safer with multiple partners, but women can produce a danger to themselves since some men are violently jealous after even one tryst.  This is grossly unfair, I know.

Staying in touch with reality is not an easy job for anyone.  It is so easy to get swept up in the moment by a bandwagon propagandist, or come to think something magical has happened by a skilled fraud using magic tricks, or come to believe things because the advocates play with the evidence and don't tell the whole truth (this is what religions do), or come to accept some nostrum from so much hoping it is true (wishful thinking) or even something simple like not wanting to be the odd man out in a group of believers and then have them turn on you with name-calling, such as "skeptic" (a title of honor in my mind).

Maybe one of the easiest ways to get out of touch with reality is to think that there must be truth (if there is smoke there is fire) of some sort in everything -- that the middle way between belief and disbelief is best -- no so, folks.  Belief must not happen and opinion assent happen only with good evidence.

Of course there is also just plain old insanity -- you know -- craziness, lunacy, paranoia out your ear, etc.

Whether Jesus existed or not as an actual person really is a matter of nothing more than historical interest.  Even if such a figure existed as a kernel around which myths evolved, the mythical Jesus never existed, and that is the one of interest.

The same thing can be said about Mohammed, who almost certainly existed as a real person but who did not do many of the things recounted about him, or of the Buddha (about whom there is less certainty).

This is a common thinking error in historiography -- that the existence of a myth tells us anything about history.  It doesn't.  Sometimes there is a historical kernel, but usually there is not, and we have no way to know.  There was no Troy, no Achilles, no Hercules, no Robin Hood, no King Arthur.  Since one cannot prove a negative, one cannot prove this, but one should assume it until there is good evidence otherwise, and the existence of the myth is not good evidence, especially if it contains miraculous or similar stuff.

The problems of interstellar travel can be overcome a few ways, and I think eventually will.  Human life expectancy may be greatly lengthened, or generational ships set out, or hibernation, and so on.  I don't think the light-speed barrier can be fudged, though.

The thing that makes their presence most unlikely is the great number of hurdles life would have to cross in order for "them" to be there -- some of which are almost certainly very unlikely.  Not that "they" don't exist, but they are almost certainly excruciatingly rare -- as rare as only one example in millions or billions of galaxies.

The way intelligent life can become common is for it to spread, and so far in our galaxy that hasn't happened or they would be here.

The historical existence of "Socrates" and of "Jesus" are different questions -- Socrates did not perform miracles and although he had his "voices," it was only his (reportedly) telling us about them that even gives us this idea.  No public miracles, no religious teaching -- just a steady inquiry into what might constitute "the good."  Even here Socrates did not pretend to have any answer -- he seems to have mainly just poked holes into what others thought.

That we have mainly Plato's word for what the man said, and this is really all just Plato's thinking, is understood.  Still there are independent reasons to think he was real, although almost certainly not quite what Plato describes.

The main issue is because there are no extraordinary claims here, the burden of proof is much lower.

We have an instinct to want to submit and worship (as well as to dominate).  It no doubt comes from the need of the group to follow a leader -- often otherwise no decision is made and generally no decision is the worst possible outcome.

We also have an instinct to believe what we were taught as children.  Again this probably evolved for group cohesion.

These instincts work by means of pleasure (joy, peace) and displeasure (fear, guilt) emotions triggered when we do something contrary to the instinct.

We flat-out don't understand what time is, whether past and future are realities or just illusions, what the present might be other than an infinitesimal between two illusions.  We also don't understand why it seems to have a direction forward (maybe it really does) when at the atomic level all events can go either forward or backward in time.

I think therefore it is a bit foolish to make statements like stuff has to exist for there to be time and that time is generated by events, although that seem the common-sense view.  Time is also one of the aspects of the "thing" called space-time, and flows at differing rates according to frame of reference -- stuff that works fine mathematically but the human mind is not built for and takes a good deal of thought to conceptualize.

Lack of belief in anything should be the default if one is rational in their approach to the world.  We are not entitled to "belief," but at best only to strong opinion.

I don't think (I have a strong opinion) that there is no God or gods.  This is based mainly on the weakness of the arguments presented for Him -- I have no need to assume the burden of providing evidence against.  Still, there is lots of evidence against -- from logical arguments to an objective look at the uncaring universe to the existence of suffering.  Theists have to rationalize out the kazoo to get around these problems with their view -- not a basis for sensible opinion forming.

About open borders and allowing immigration.

First, living "on top of each other" is great.  The condo provides all sorts of things and services people otherwise have to get themselves, manage themselves, and drive somewhere to obtain.   It is also ecologically much better.  That said, overcrowding applied to the US is a silly notion -- the States is a big underpopulated country with plenty of room for sprawling suburbs if that is what you really want.

Allowing free immigration is great for foreign relations.  A local population from a given country tends to influence the country back home to be friendly, and the fact that the country allows its nationals in avoids feelings of the receiving country being selfish, racist, what have you.  As things are now a lot of the hate directed toward the States is because of its restrictive immigration -- the US really is seen as racist and selfish and only interested in exploiting the rest of the world by large numbers of people, for just this reason.

There is a well-known tendency for those who immigrate to be more ambitions, more energetic and more intelligent than those who stay home.  If you look at immigrant populations, such as Asians or Jews or Eastern Europeans, within a generation or so they begin to be at the top of the achievement ladder, so long as they are not held down too much by discrimination (which is what holds down African and Mexican Americans).  In other words, with open immigration a country tends to get the "cream of the crop."

-- A side note here about Latin America -- the US cannot afford to have such a large country as Mexico poor and feeling exploited -- allowing them more freely into the States is almost a necessity, as otherwise you have hate brewing in Mexico and a large illegal population in the States who feel no loyalty and also feel exploited.

New arrivals, especially if uneducated, not speaking English, poor, and so on, are a temporary burden on educational and health care systems (both of which in the States are in huge need  of massive overhaul anyway) and in some limited cases add to crime.  This is short term until they become acculturated, and the investment is worth it.

Businesses in a country with unrestricted immigration can freely recruit what they need anywhere without the need to ship the jobs overseas -- not that they get cheap labor as a competitive labor market quickly nips anything like that -- but that they can find the best skill sets and best track records anywhere without a lot of bureaucracy and difficulty.  This helps the economy.

A growing population naturally brings about a growing economy, and the nation stays strong, with a ready pool of people for the military and the economy.  It also stays younger, with a large pool of working people to support the elderly (with present demographic trends services like Social Security are going to have to be steadily limited more and more so as not to be such a huge drain on the economy).  The birth rate in the States, as with most developed countries, is just not enough to sustain the present population, let alone grow the nation.

Without more people the US will soon become like Britain -- important but not dominant.

As Islam is today, I can see where allowing massive numbers of Muslims in would cause fear -- even though the vast majority would acculturate over a couple generations, such a community would tend to produce a certain number of terrorists and other evils, in spite of their parents.  I can't see any good way to manage that, and admit it.

I can also see some restrictions being reasonable -- a sort of point system without a waiting period -- for education and English and family relations and freedom from criminal record, but not numeric limits or quotas.  (Quotas are inherently racist even if not intended as white countries don't fill their quotas and brown and black countries develop long waiting periods).

One final thing -- what other countries do is beside the point -- that one country is stupid doesn't mean the States has to be stupid too.

One of the mistakes in thinking that I see both theists and some non-theists making is the assumption time has always existed, but, logically, that can't be so, since one cannot get from infinitely far away either in distance or time to here in any trip.  Time logically had a beginning.  (See note below).

This is difficult, I know, and caused me a lot of time meditating to come to understand it.  Time itself had a beginning, and not in some "super-time."  To say "before" the beginning of time is a meaningless statement -- there was no before.  Time began and things happen after that, but not "before."  One cannot even meaningfully say there was "nothing" before -- there was no before.  It also follows that the beginning of time was uncaused, since there could be nothing prior to time to cause it.

The oft-repeated mantra that "something cannot come from nothing," when I hear it, merely tells me the speaker lacks intelligence and imagination and cannot think outside a rather juvenile and naive philosophical box, usually motivated by a desire to hold onto childhood beliefs (an interesting psychological issue in itself).  I usually avoid exchange with such people.  Religious belief seems to stifle thinking with an arrogant confidence.

Note: Sometimes people say if time has been traveling forever then in this infinite time it could have gotten from infinitely far away to here.  That has a certain logic, but think about it -- can something travel "forever?"  No matter how old you might become, assuming you live forever -- a million, a billion, whatever years -- your age will always be finite.  "Forever" or "infinite" are not numbers, and the constant fallacy of thinking of them as numbers creates this confusion.

I admit that a singularity -- an object of infinite density and zero size -- is not comprehensible in terms of human experience.  It therefore naturally gets opposition.

I don't really know what to think; my inclination is to suspect that there must be unknown forces that stop the collapse before that happens, but we have to accept that because we cannot imagine something is not reason to say it cannot be.  More likely is a failure of our imagination.

My impression is that most Muslims are what any reasonable non-Muslim would call radical Islamists, and while they may 'tut' at the beheadings and so on as counterproductive, they are ambiguous about it, and don't condemn it.  In other ways almost all Muslims are "fundamentalist" (in the sense that they do believe and don't rationalize or claim metaphor) whereas most Christians are not.

In my mind this makes Islam dangerous, and, while individual Muslims may be good neighbors and all that, the community will constantly produce very dangerous young men.  It's inherent in the meme.

Another thing is that while Muslims practice charity and love, it is reserved for only other Muslims, and generally even only for the same sect.  Some Christians are that way too.  It always gets me when religions broadcast their charities and don't mention this.

There are many ways life on earth could have begun, but we can't really say because the traces have pretty much been wiped out by subsequent biological and geological events.

It's not hard to envision a reducing atmosphere (no free oxygen around to destroy complex chemicals) with several energy sources and an ocean.  We know that such an environment would, within weeks, produce a soup of amino acids and similar chemicals.  Then give it a few million to a few hundred million years.  All you need is one molecule that makes a copy of itself from this soup -- not even an exact copy, just one that perpetuates, and then natural selection happens automatically to build the complex machinery people wonder at now.

Life was of a single-celled nature after that for a couple billion years, no doubt refining the processes, before striking out into organisms we recognize as getting advanced.