There is absolutely no direct evidence that dates from the time Jesus supposedly lived that any such religious leader was born,
There exist only two non-biblical pieces of evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate -- and he was the damn Prefect of Judaea for Cthulhu's sake. How much "direct evidence" do you expect for a rather Jewish-cult-leader, one of possibly dozen such groups the time?
Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion,
So is it just his noteworthiness that you doubt, not his existence?
Given that lack of evidence the most parsimonious explanation is just that Jesus is fictional.
No, that's a completely unbelievable explanation. If he was fictional he'd not have been of Nazareth with a circuitous reasoning about why he was also of Bethlehem -- he'd have been directly of Bethlehem. His name wouldn't have been Jesus with a completely circuitous explanation about why "Emmanuel" also counts as his name, his name would have been directly Emmanuel.
Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real. If the Christian movement had began in the 1st century, and yet its founder placed as having lived in 3rd century BC, that explanation might make sense. But he was placed as a contemporary, and expected to be believed to be real. You don't do that with fictional founders of your order.
Jesus was a real historical figure. His being fictional just doesn't make sense -- same way that Mohammed being fictional doesn't make sense -- or do you also believe Mohammed fictional?
No, that's a completely unbelievable explanation. If he was fictional he'd not have been of Nazareth with a circuitous reasoning about why he was also of Bethlehem -- he'd have been directly of Bethlehem. His name wouldn't have been Jesus with a completely circuitous explanation about why "Emmanuel" also counts as his name, his name would have been directly Emmanuel.
These all seem to me to be false dichotomies, which assume that it's impossible either for a single creator to have embroidered their story as they went along, or for multiple crea...
To break up the awkward silence at the start of a recent Overcoming Bias meetup, I asked everyone present to tell their rationalist origin story - a key event or fact that played a role in their first beginning to aspire to rationality. This worked surprisingly well (and I would recommend it for future meetups).
I think I've already told enough of my own origin story on Overcoming Bias: how I was digging in my parents' yard as a kid and found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem, and how I wore it to bed that night and dreamed of a woman in white, holding an ancient leather-bound book called Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (eds. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, 1982)... but there's no need to go into that again.
So, seriously... how did you originally go down that road?
Added: For some odd reason, many of the commenters here seem to have had a single experience in common - namely, at some point, encountering Overcoming Bias... But I'm especially interested in what it takes to get the transition started - crossing the first divide. This would be very valuable knowledge if it can be generalized. If that did happen at OB, please try to specify what was the crucial "Aha!" insight (down to the specific post if possible).