If there is an existing chat or meta discussion around Mark's canned skeptic questions that one of you know, can you give me a pointer to it, please? I feel like he's trolling, and my tolerance of what feels like nonsense just broke. I'd like to see the rationale encouraging the sort of questions like "bigfoot vs resurrection" and "the gospels are just reports of reports of reports".

On the last one (reports of reports) Mike gave a fantastic answer, so maybe that's justification for leaving the questions up. On the other hand, that Q in particular is rather rude, implying that someone who believes the gospel accounts is not "rational, neutral, and open-minded" for some un-stated reason.

I'll admit that I'm a bit worn thin on patience with this, because this year I spent some time with a friend who brought all of the same talking points, from Sagan and Dawkins, and we had to hash out the whole thing over several weeks: scientific vs historical methods, differences between scientific and legal evidence, the flying spaghetti monster, ET life...

And on the other hand, God's word, faith, and certainty beyond the light cone...

A meta discussion about skeptic or atheist trolls in general would work, too.