You mean there is no evidence that you are willing to accept.
Actually it's the other way around. People who believe in God are pursuing myth under the assumption that it's an authoritative historical narrative. That's untrue. And that fact constitutes the only evidence in play. To be religious you have to deny the evidence. You have allow superstition, myth, legend and fable replace the real artifacts of history. Now who did you say is ignoring the evidence?
And there is just one God,
Even the God of Christiantity doesn't fit that description. First, in Gen 1, God was
Elohim which is the plural
Gods most likely borrowed from the pre-existent Ugaritic pantheon. Second, when Elohim was replaced with Yahweh (Gen 2 etc) his wife Asherah, was imported with him from similar origins. Third, when there was a new niche to fill after the Roman destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, God spawned the demigod Jesus, following a litany of similar demigods who were sons of the chief god. That in itself created an impossibility that Christianity is clearly monotheistic. In Jesus' own purported words, he said on the cross "Father why have you forsaken me?" The word YOU is second person exclusively because there is a second person involved. Fourth, at some rather nebulous juncture, the early Christians for some reason needed a third God, the Holy Spirit, to supplement the other two. Fifth, the apotheosis of the Apostles, who magically became short-term demigods (healing powers etc) developed into a pantheon of Saints, as you well know. As you see for all its attempts to extricate itself from its polytheistic roots, the Judeo-Christian invention never really cut the umbilical cord.
you need not belittle Him by grouping him with Zeus, Loki and Quetzalcoatl.
Aw geez. Like that's no different than saying "my God is bigger than yours". That's straight from the fundamentalist's playbook.
Actually in the ancient world from which your God evolved, that grouping would have been a compliment. Indeed the early Israelites realized that, among all of the legacy gods known to them were those of their fiercest enemies. In many cases these included cults in which the gods of a pantheon battled among themselves, from which some chief god rose to the top of the heap. That partly applies to Loki but it fits pretty well with Zeus. And indeed Zeus had a huge influence on the proto-Christian cult as did the prevailing Greek philosophy, Stoicism. Thus Jesus is cast as the Stoic Socrates, the tragic martyr who drinks from the cup of his passion on the eve of his suicide, for the crime of believing in only one God, Zeus, which Plato preserves as Theos, the name that the Christians adopted when they reinvented Yahweh. Further Jesus is accompanied by 12 followers and gathers with them at his last supper just before his crucifixion as did another similarly created demi-god of that era, Mithra. Further, you get an entirely different interpretation of Jesus from the Gnostics, who weave his story under a completely different paradigm, a highly mystical figure closer to the hallucinatory world of Book of Revelation. That's roughly five re-brandings of the same package. Which one is the real McCoy? The one that survived Roman conquest of Europe (ignoring the variant in Revelation)? If not for a few battles here or there, a different person in charge of the Library at Alexandria, or who knows what, you'd be here convincing us that Mithra rules and Jesus drools. And if Spain had lost to the Aztecs, and if they had gone on to conquer the Spanish possessions north and west of
Tejas y Coahuila for all we know you'd be praising Quetzalcoatl, at least if you had happened to have been indoctrinated in what is now the Southwestern United States.
I have been to thousands of Catholic masses, and scores of non-denominational services. Not once has any one ever vilified anyone, and we certainly were not setting ourselves apart because all are always welcome.
I'm certain that during the Spanish Inquisition a great many parishoners and clerics said the same thing. It's quite easy for any group sitting in a room, excluded from its enemies, to come to a consensus that their hands are clean.
Obviously in the setting of a modern-day service it may be harder to directly vilify others without shocking the congregation. Nor do Catholics comport themselves or convey the same xenophobia as fundamentalists typically do. At the moment I'm recalling some of the fundies who blamed victims of certain natural disasters--that this was the sins of their fathers being visited upon them by a vengeful God. There are countless examples.
But the way Catholics hate on people is more nuanced. While they have gradually yielded on a great many of the social conservative policies of the Victoria era, they are still stubbornly resisting abortion and gay rights. In order to truly live inside that highest standard of tolerance which Catholicism aspires to, it must first drop its opposition to both.
Some posters above have argued that atheists and cavemen and maybe even atheistic caveman had a handle on civility and fair play, and giving their neighbor the cloak off their back and walking that extra mile, but no, I'm sure that much of such thinking originated with a bearded revolutionary Jewish fellow, and his name was not Karl Marx.
I had to figure out who you meant, since I was not aware that Catholics believe Jesus had a beard. But you're mistaken. Human civilization was thriving for centuries before the Jesus legend emerged from its Hellenistic and Judaic roots. Indeed Christianity was founded on legacy civilizations. And the bearded fellow who presaged Jesus was not John the Baptist, but Plato. It's he who gives the world the precedent role model for virtue in his rendering of Socrates.
Wisdom is wisdom, but Jesus teachings went beyond anything known before.
Jesus was definitely not the first. He was little more than Socrates reimagined. And of course it's nothing more than legend. But you can get a lot more clarity and direct ethical content from reading Plato than reading the rambling and bizarre legends of the New Testament. At least Plato enshrines logic as the foundation for all ethics rather than superstition.
Jesus Christ IS the evidence.
Which is the same as saying there is no evidence since Jesus is not even a historical person.