Cool, thanks so much for mentioning the Rationality reading group!! I'm probably going to finish each section long before it's discussed, but I'll definitely go back to re-read and chat. I'll bookmark it for sure! So exciting! I will try to bribe my sister and maybe a few other people to participate as well (self-anchoring again, maybe, but I'll call it optimism, haha).

Ooh, I like consistency, and Christianity is inconsistent. Christianity conflicts with itself. A God can't be both perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish. That's why I rejected it. Yeah, that sounds nice, thanks for the words. :)

Good point about vagueness. I like this slatestarcodex post" The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories Looking forward to parts N and P now too!

And yeah, good point about the standards of evidence being too high. Still, right now my only info about Historical Jesus is based off a few articles I've read on the internet, and I just feel like after 22 years learning one thing, I can't just reject it and jump ahead to other things without being able to formulate basic, well-reasoned atheist answers to common Christian questions. I guess it's not just about maintaining my friends' respect, it's also about my own self-respect. I can't go around showing the improbability of every religion, but I want to be able to do so about the one I grew up in (maybe this is a cousin of the sunk-cost fallacy?). Luckily, all of the groundwork here has already been done by other atheists, it should just a matter of familiarizing myself with basic facts/common arguments.