Bare with me, as I have a few different threads of thought going around right now.
While it would be true that an omniscient God would have infinite resources to spread his message (you can call it simple, but let's be honest; if the message is real it surpasses all amount of human understanding), an effective author is one that can cater to his reader. So I mean, I don't think it's that God couldn't do any better, it's that we couldn't receive any better. I can be the most accomplished dog trainer in the world, but I won't ever be able to express to a dog about my job and my family in a way it would understand. That only says something about the dog, not about me. Same thing with God the Father and God the son - patriarchal language. A skeptic will look at that as evidence that they're a contrived human invention - I think it's just as logical that God would choose to reveal Himself in an approachable and comprehendable way; a sexless deity would have severely freaked people the f*** out.
You're a smart dude x, but one thing I think I see from your responses is that you don't really seem to give proper respect to the infinitely gaping chasm between the power/knowledge of a hypothetical deity and our own. Your arguments are educated but they seem to just make a supposed God out to be a dummy. And I agree with what someone above said - if God's messiah were to reveal himself today, in this age of information and technology, your argument is that it would help his cause but my belief is that it would actually worsen it. While we might have better information across the board, we also have humongous amounts of cynicism and skepticism from being spoon-fed these huge quantities and told to believe them. That's only part of the picture, admittedly, from my perspective (answering the question of why Jesus didn't come now instead of 2k years ago), since I'm content in trusting that part of the reason for his timing was providential and divine and not something so obvious.
Lastly, as far as muddying the waters and not being distinguishable from any other myth, a lot of that I admittedly don't have a concrete response to, but the resurrection is the distinction. Even if every single other element were the same down to names and dates and places compared to ever other religious faith, the resurrection is the crux.
In the first season HBO's
Rome, there is a little scene between Mark Antony and Julius Caesar that's easy to gloss over, but I thought it was illuminating. At the time Caesar was fighting a civil war against Pompey Magnus. Antony, Caesar's close friend, is lobbying for a more aggressive strategy against Pompey, who Antony equates to "an apple ripe for the plucking." But Caesar’s reply, I think, foreshadows many of Antony's later tactical and political failures: "Pompey is not an apple, and I am not a farmer." Antony had drawn a false analogy, offering a simplistic military solution to a complex political problem. Monotheism has a similar problem with analogies in these debates. For example, the problem with the dog trainer-to-dog analogy is simply this:
A dog trainer is limited in his/her ability to teach a dog, but God is not limited in any sense, by any thing, ever. God is not a dog trainer.
I've never liked the "God is beyond our comprehension argument,” because it is essentially an argument from ignorance. You think God had a perfectly sane, albeit complicated reason for showing up in a way that would throw a shadow of doubt, confusion, and misinterpretation over his glorious coming for two thousand years? Okay, try me. What is the reason? What
might the reason even be? Before you say something is beyond our comprehension, let's at least put it on the table.
Your point about the modern world's doubt and skepticism doesn't add up, either, because God is definitionally more than equal to the task of intellectual maggots like Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins (or Carrier) or Neil Degrasse Tyson or Lawrence Krauss or, least of all, little old Husker_x. This is
God we’re talking about, right?
Roark put a little Problem of Evil spin on my argument, which is fine. My original point was more a Problem of Competence thing, but it works out anyway. God's power to spread a message is infinite, no matter how simple or complex. He is able to present it in any way he wants, including a kind of direct transmission to every person on the planet. He could, even if you're right about us not receiving it correctly, rewire the human brain so that it
could receive the message (and if human beings have a problem receiving the message, how did you get it, while we’re on the topic?).
But revealing this message to a bunch of illiterates who would then have to pass it on to a Greek-speaking translator who would himself rework it into a different language, confuse it with elements of mythology, and then have
that work transmitted by hand copies for centuries, leaving modern readers with scraps of copies of jumbled pseudo-history and contradictory accounts, is not the most optimal method of proliferating the most important message mankind has ever received. Especially when your celestial PR department has the resources of an omnipotent superbeing.
Fortunately, I have an alternative explanation that makes perfect sense: God didn't write it, or inspire it––never even intended it, because in all likelihood, he doesn’t exist. Human authors do this kind of stuff all the time--look at how many versions of how many sacred texts of how many religions there are. All of them just as inexplicable as the Bible.
Whoa that's a long reply.
