I think Lemmy has a problem with history in general, since most people on here have degrees/training in STEM. I see a lot of inaccurate “pop history” shared on here, and a lack of understanding of historiography/how historians analyze primary sources.
The rejection of Jesus’s historicity seems to be accepting C S Lewis’s argument - that if he existed, he was a “lunatic, liar, or lord,” instead of realizing that there was nothing unusual about a messianic Jewish troublemaker in Judea during the early Roman Empire.
Sometimes people aren’t always trying to convince people to leave cults, and are instead just trying to describe and discuss aspects of reality, like religions.
People should care about reality, reality involves religious people driving how that reality progresses.
If you disagree with that, you don’t actually care about truth, you are an anti-intellectual.
Ideas must be considered, explored, examanined, discussed, in order to determine their truth or falsity.
And they’re free to do that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with with improving conditions for anyone or deprogramming cultists, so to assert that everyone should spend their time on it is ridiculous, as it amounts to a hobby.
People have a limited amount of time in their lives to spend. Learning about a religion, or how it ties into real history, should be done as a hobby by those interested or when it is pragmatic to do so. Arguing with zealots about how their cult ties into history is a pointless endeavor that is really playing their game, and therefore not pragmatic.
Now you’re just being unserious.
Not all ideas are equal. If someone says we should genocide an ethnic group, the correct response is to recoil in horror and condemn the idea. When someone makes supernatural claims from their religious cult, the correct response is to make arguments that have at least some chance for a spark of deconversion - not to engage them in a rousing conversation about minutia that will NEVER have any positive impact.