i don't view the messianic religions much differently than a greek scholar would have between constantine and justinian. and, that's not a throwaway statement.

unfortunately, the christians had a habit of burning books that had opinions they didn't like in it, so we've lost a lot of the best critiques. one of the most powerful neo-platonist critiques of christianity came from a well-regarded scholar named porphyry and was called against the christians. we know this was an influential text because it was widely quoted, but we don't have an extant version of it.

remember: at the end of the nightmare, western europe had to translate from arab into latin because we didn't just lose the greek and sometimes latin originals, but we didn't even know how to read greek :\. that's a remarkable thing, isn't it? the greatest empire in the world lost the ability to read it's own language, and most of the texts written in it.

is there any wonder that porphyry wrote the book he did?

the modern equivalents are in hitchens and dawkins, who i've read less of than you might guess. hitchens more so.

i read a lot of isaac asimov when i was very young. that's the real source, here.