I don’t consider “a dude might have existed 2000 years ago and built an enduring reputation” to be very compelling. Especially not while living in a world where everybody around me has instant access to the whole of human knowledge and yet so many stay disconnected from reality.

I mean if he wanted to, he could materialize in front of every single one of us like Doctor Manhattan to give us reassurance and a taste of being in the presence of his light. He knows what each of us needs in order to be brought into the faith. Yet, he presents us with a world indistinguishable from one where he doesn’t exist, and he has gifted us with these incredible conscious intelligent minds, and his main rule of existence is that we don’t use that intelligence to explore the world he’s given us and instead rely on some ancient translated and edited texts.

The infinitely merciful and infinitely just thing seems to me like a simple logical contradiction along the lines of asking whether God can create a stone so big that he himself cannot lift it. Isn’t the whole point of showing mercy that you let somebody off the hook instead of making them submit to what would otherwise be just?