The three best new videos of me of late are: (1) my talk at the Madison Freethought Festival: So…if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then? (you can also view a PDF of the slideshow, lacking the animations); (2) my talk the year before for Wichita Rapture Day: You’re All Gonna Die!! How the Jews Kept Failing to Predict Doomsday and Caused Christianity Instead (you can also view a PDF of the slideshow, lacking the animations); and (3) my interview for WorldviewNaturalism.com (on how I came to naturalism and what it means for moral theory and the scientific advancement of moral knowledge). That latter site has several other interesting new resources, including interviews with several others and an extensive online catalog of debates.

My Madison talk is essentially a brief précis of what I believe to be the most defensible Jesus myth theory and why it probably better explains the origins of Christianity than traditional theories do. Obviously it’s not a proof against all objections, just a quick first glance at what it is and how a defense of it would most likely proceed. My Rapture Day talk, by contrast, operates on the assumption of historicity (sticking to my methodological position that we should assume historicity until a significant segment of the expert community is on board with any alternative, while treating the Jesus myth theory as only a hypothesis, still in need of proper review). However, its analysis would apply equally to a Jesus myth model (with suitable adaptation). I just don’t discuss that there.

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