Husker shark, you have to remember that there will come a time in the histroy of the world when believers will be very small in numbers. You will have the humanists who think that man is the height of wisdom and will give glory to their idols. And that any belief in God is unintelligent and will be scoffed at by the intellectual elitists. The only thing you can do is tell them the word of God so when they go before him he can say they were told and they rejected him. :ahhhhhhhh
While I don't think man has achieved 'the height of wisdom,' our modern, secular morality is far superior to the blood soaked nonsense preached in the Old Testament, or the New, for that matter. And you've mistaken a belief in a god being scoffed at with a belief in a god (and all the superstitious claims that come with it) being seriously questioned. Think about it. Why is it so difficult for you--any of you, really--to simply demonstrate your god is real? How hard could it be for this being who you claim used to appear regularly?
When Thallus wrote...
The Armenian reference places the end of Thallus' "brief compendium" at the 167th Olympiad (which spans 112-109 BCE). This would remain uncontested if it were not for a single reference to Thallus regarding an event long after that time: namely, the darkness at the death of Christ.
Phlegon was born 80 CE, so he was not a witness to the events.
Lastly, it gets dark before every single rainstorm... nothing supernatural there.
I'm glad somebody finally brought this up. The entire list crumbles just as easily if you look into the sources, get rid of the interpolations, check the dates, find out exactly what was said, etc. That list is one of those apologist smokescreens that tries to prevent you from seeing the obvious: there is not a single contemporary eye witness testimony of Jesus anywhere, and that includes the synoptic gospels and John, which are themselves anonymous documents written decades and decades after the fact.
Also, I'm still wondering about this 'spiritual energy of the universe.' No idea what that means.