16:08
"recorded eye witness accounts are the best we have for most of history" - Well... (a) There's also corroborating physical evidence for a lot of history. (b) A lot of it has independent and contemporary accounts. (c) Most of history isn't claiming much extraordinary - if I tell you that I had breakfast this morning, it'd be reasonable enough to believe me, because many people do that every day. If I tell you I shot lazer beams from my eyes, you should doubt that.
(d) Accepting that e.g. Caesar existed and did stuff does not entail any changes to your life (if it did, it would make sense to apply more scrutiny to that... and also, we have much, much better evidence for Caesar than Jesus). NONE of that is true for the Bible.
"the claim is 500+ witnesses" - there's ONE account (Paul) of 500 witnesses. If I tell you there were 500 people who saw me shoot lazer beams from your eyes (but you can't hear from any of those people directly), does that add any credence whatsoever to my claim? It shouldn't.
And a lot of the 4 so-called independent accounts are word-for-word copies with incompatible differences in other places, which makes more sense as them just copying from one another (in particular: subsequent accounts made the story more extraordinary; e.g. the resurrection in Mark is commonly considered to be a later addition), rather than them having been actual witnesses (also especially considering that the texts are dated to decades after the events in question).
"There was no riches or reward on earth for protecting Christianity..." - you could say the same about other religions. People perpetuate it because (a) they considered it a myth, and they perpetuated it as such (but this context was lost over time) and/or (b) people really believed it (or somewhere in between: people didn't draw a clear distinction between fact and fiction... as you don't seem to either). This says little about whether it's true.
Also, the church gained millennia of immense power, money and influence from this (this is much reduced today, compared to the height of their power).
"the 'best possible account' possible before the digital era" - that's far from true. In comparison to other notable figures at the time, the evidence for Jesus is rather poor. Also, this is supposed to be the inspired word of an all-powerful (or "all-authority") entity, yet you're judging it by human standards, as if the text is constrained to human ability, as if Jesus just arrived when he arrived with no planning or forethought and the humans around just needed to make the best of that.
If we consider that God could've done anything whatsoever, Jesus could've come at any time (including in the digital era), he could've gone to multiple places, etc. - by that standard, the evidence seems abysmal.
"this is physically possible" - that's the key point with a lot of those miracles. I'm far from a specialist in trees or snakes or flowers or chemical processes, to be able to make much judgement about what's going on there. I have heard experts break down various supposed miracles into rather mundane explanations. But if we don't know, then the answer is just "we don't know".
This idea of religious artifacts having some magical property that affects things around it - I'd say that's questionable evidence for a god. If it's meant to be a message or sign from god, the meaning is far too vague and ambiguous, and it's far too likely that it's just some natural process we may or may not understand yet.
How many churches are there in the world? How many possible things can happen in or around any given church? How many things happen in nature that we don't understand, that might seem significant to us if it happened near a significant place? Add all of that together, and also add in humans possibly helping those events along, and you'd end up with a plenty of churches where a lot of seemingly-significant things happen (and plenty where they don't). That's just a statistical inevitability.
"people believe what they want to believe" - not consciously, but yeah. Although that's not a good thing.
"people being stupid and irresponsible are not helpful. But that is true regardless of religion" - but unjustified belief creates harm on top of that. Even if people try to be good and generous and responsible, they often still end up doing harm, because they act on their beliefs, and those don't correspond to what's true if those are unjustified. This problem also exists in the pseudoscience "wellness" industry, some political rhetoric, etc., but I also oppose all of that.
"who basically changed the faith from being about Love... into this 'just don't get sent to hell' mentality" - but you still maintain that there'll be some form of suffering in the afterlife (even if it's "your own doing" or something). So if someone's already doing the love thing, it's natural for them to wonder whether they're doing the "right" things to avoid the suffering (and with unjustified belief, that's unresolvable).
"...your children..." - As a hypothetical parent, I'd start off giving my hypothetical children some foundation of truth, sure. But more than that, I'd try to teach them how to evaluate evidence and reason soundly to come to justified belief, and also to live morally with a solid moral foundation. As part of this, I would almost certainly give them an honest representation of the most pervasive unjustified beliefs (religion is one of the most common), to share my reasoning for rejecting those.
Of course, I wouldn't want them to believe things I consider unjustified or do things I consider immoral. But I can only do so much to stop that (i.e. teach them well). Isolating them from bad ideas seems more likely to leave them unprepared to deal with those (although it's not like I'd read them Mein Kampf or whatever). A solid epistemology doesn't have much to fear from disagreement.
And, who knows, maybe they'll prove me wrong in some respects. I'd consider that a sign that I did a good job.
A lot of religious folks (particularly fundamentalists) are a lot more afraid of letting their children see anything that disagrees with their belief, and they'll outright lie about atheists and about science (probably heavily influenced by the fear-mongering that's built-in to their belief, that those things lead to eternal hellfire).
Or at least apologists outright lie (or they're utterly blinded by cognitive bias so they can't see that they're doing something wrong when told time after time after time that they're misrepresenting facts and misrepresenting other people). Regular parents may just believe apologists and pastors and not know any better.
"how to you avoid over simplification of religions" - split religions into some similar groups and have them decide amongst themselves how to best represent their own group. There can be different classes at stages. 10-year-olds might benefit from just getting a few 10-minute overviews of different religions. Teens have more reasoning ability and they'd have been exposed to more apologetics and such, so that may benefit from some Q&As. And universities already offer comparative religion courses.
We oversimplify lots of things for education. Even for things like maths, we initially teach that you can't squareroot a negative number, and it's only at university where one might learn the foundational principles of maths, that justifies why maths is the way it is.
"Christianity ... is now 100,000 splinters ... I think fundamentally you don't actually want it" - well, atheism doesn't quite have the same problem, so maybe I'm a bit biased (on the other hand, a lot of Christians do like to simply call themselves Christian, and plenty don't even know what denomination they are). Atheists believe a wide range of things, but on the topic of atheism, I suspect I could get most atheists to agree on some 10-minute overview of different perspectives of atheists.
