I attended a adjunct professor training course for my college. We talked about handling sensitive topics and how to deal with students who get riled up. The subject of religion was the one that apparently gets folks from 0-60 in three seconds. One of the participants told of a class they taught where one of the students questioned the validity of Jesus and another student within seconds was threatening to do severe bodily harm to the "non-believer" student. The police were actually called to escort the "Jesus" student out of the classroom.

According to the Mormon church, and they are deadly serious, Mithra, freemasonary, Tammuz worship and Dionysus were all sent to earth by the devil to mock the Christian saviour and the true faith, thousands of years before he was born in order to sow doubt in the minds of men.
Taking the piss by doing it before he did, sort of inverted plagiarism.
An them thur Murman boy went ahead and lapped it all up.

Remember the advice Mark Twain gave, "Never argue with an idiot, they'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience!"

That would be Mothra, as in "Mothra vs. Godzilla", a black & white cult classic with truly terrible dubbing. Pretty good spe ial effects for the time, though....

How can you really have any sort of debate when their answer will boil down to either, "Because the bible says so!" or "That is my faith!"????

That's why I think studying ancient religions and mythologies should become mandatory in school. No one in their right mind would then be arrogant enough to claim that their religion is something unique, formed in some kind of a vacuum. Who would believe in the virgin birth story and resurrection, if they realized they were borrowed from Zoroastrianism? @David1955 is absolutely right! Blind faith is the only thing that's keeping these myths "relevant" today.

Oh yes. Telling Christians that their Jesus has scant historical basis, or is a composite of various pre-Christian figures, or may have been several Jewish preacher-saviours from the first century blended together, or was just a story that became so "real" to people over time they forgot it was a story (like if people forgot that Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character), and so on, only gets their backs up and makes them dig in. Citing historians with Doctorates and lists of peer recognized publications only ticks them off further.

Is it so different now? Trying telling Trump supporters that he's not a billionaire; that he isn't a great deal maker; that he isn't making America great again; that his word means nothing; that he doesn't give crap about 'the little guy'; that he isn't draining the swamp but rather snorting the swamp in every way, and so on, the evidence so obvious.

It's called faith based belief. The reasoning part of the brain is turned off. It's tough dealing with people like that.

Thinking more about it, what sort of a failed broken education system do we have which lets people leave school with such a complete lack of historical knowledge anyway ?

I always thought the story of Gilgamesh was what the ancient Sumerians used for JC.

Don't hold your breath. Theists who join such groups are not usually wanting to learn, only to have their prejudices confirmed.