If you talk to the religious, they are convinced that there’s no way that a cult could arise in short order with a messiah that isn’t real. That’s how they know that Jesus was God!

Apparently, they haven’t looked at what’s going on in the world right now.

There was this little thing called Scientology, something made up from whole cloth around 1954 by a science fiction writer who was trying to make a buck. Within a decade, it had thousands of adherents and by 1960, just a few years after starting, it had about 2 million followers. By 2008, it was at 10 million, although it’s fallen off quite dramatically since then. That means that in less than 10 years, Scientology had grown faster than Christianity did in the first century, more than it did in the first four centuries, until the Roman Empire adopted it and pushed it on the people by force.

There’s a widely told story that there was a bet between L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein that Hubbard couldn’t create a successful religion. That is unsupported. However, there are lots of stories by people who were involved that lend at least some credence to it. Isaac Asimov, in an interview in 1980, suggested that it was bigger than that, taking place informally between Asimov, Hubbard, Heinlein and others, over who could create the best religious story. Harlan Ellison said, in an interview in 1978,

Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ’s sakes! … We were sitting around one night… who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said “This bullshit’s got to stop!” He says, “I gotta get money.” He says, “I want to get rich”. And somebody said, “why don’t you invent a new religion? They’re always big.” We were clowning! You know, “Become Elmer Gantry! You’ll make a fortune!” He says, “I’m going to do it.”

There’s your invented religion which came into existence and became popular in less time than we saw in the first century CE for Christianity. It’s not the only one though.

Jovan Pulitzer is running around right now telling people that Trump is the messiah foretold in the Old Testament. This is within 8 years of his election. Now granted, I used to support Trump, before he and his followers lost their ever-loving minds and started believing their own press, but that’s all gone now. That doesn’t mean that I support the Democrats. I think Biden is a complete waste of human skin. I am now party-less, which is actually fine. I don’t need to be part of a political cult to operate. The point remains that, in less than a decade, a new cult has arisen that exploded out of nowhere by a bunch of lunatic Christians.

That’s just two examples of exactly the thing that Christians claim can’t happen, happening in the last century alone. Do the religious actually care about that? No, of course not, because they’re not interested in reality. They have an agenda to push and push it they will.