Atheism

Whether or not he was based on a real person does not matter at all because that's not who Christians worship.

The problem with this thinking is it cedes the historical figure to the crazies following the BS version of events drafted to undermine that original figure.

For example, have you ever wondered why the public saying of the sower parable, about how seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn't multiply and only the seeds which reproduce multiply, is the only parable in Mark and Luke given a secret explanation in private?

Why was a saying about seeds so dangerous it needed to be explained concretely?

You probably don't know that the only other explanation for this parable before the middle ages was the one recorded among the Naassenes, who thought it was about seeds scattered at the dawn of the cosmos through which the universe was completed. This same group was saying the mustard seed parable about the smallest seed was in reference to an indivisible point as if from nothing.

If you aren't familiar with Leucretius, you might miss that what's being discussed here is Epicurean atomism as he rendered it in his epic poem in Latin 50 years before Jesus was born. Not having the Greek word atomos ('indivisible') to rely on, he instead called the same concept in De Rerum Natura 'seeds.'

Given that book is the only extant work from antiquity to describe survival of the fittest, this means he was writing about how these indivisible seeds randomly scattered at the beginning of the cosmos interacted to gradually develop the Earth and then plants and animals, and how only the things which survived to reproduce continued on. In fact, in book 4 he explicitly refers to failed biological reproduction as "seed that falls by the wayside of the path."

So here's Jesus 80 years after this is written, in a conservative religious theocracy, talking publicly about how randomly thrown seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn't reproduce and the seed which does survive to reproduce multiples like crazy. He ends up allegedly the enemy number one of that religious theocracy who eventually have him killed, his followers are persecuted by Jerusalem, and his movement ends up co-opted outside Jerusalem's influence by the guy persecuting them. And that co-opted version of the story offers up a secret explanation for the above parable, as well as secret claims of having been the Jewish messiah, and later on he's said to have been claiming to not have been changing one word of the Jewish law.

And the version of his sayings that doesn't say anything about being a messiah, ridiculed following religious law, and includes things like "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels" ends up declared heresy and buried in a jar for millennia because even owning it becomes punishable by death.

But 99.9% of the population doesn't know any of the above because a third believes in the BS version with the secret explanations and the other two thirds are so tired of having that BS version shoved down their throats they assume there's nothing worthwhile in looking into the historical figure which caused the BS version to exist in the first place.