There's one of the points where belief and logic part company for me. If god's real, it can't possibly be a violation of free will to know it.
That's C. S. Lewis's argument in Mere Christianity, but he couldn't make it work either. The moral standard comes from us. We are social creatures, but we're also individuals with different interests and desires, so we've worked out rules in our societies about what's acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and evolution has fitted us with the cognitive tools to do that. That's an oversimplification of course, textbooks could be written on that subject, but it's the essence of it; no further explanation is necessary. It's not necessary to postulate a source outside ourselves for our ability to make and enforce rules for ourselves. The existence of a deity doesn't explain anything, it just creates more things that need explaining, such as, where does the deity get his moral standards?
And on a related matter, people should stop claiming that you can't prove a negative. You can. In fact one of the basic rules of logic is a negative, the law of non-contradiction (a proposition cannot be both true and false), and it's provable. What people really mean is that you cannot inductively prove a negative, but that's trivial, you cannot inductively prove anything. The nature of induction is to make a conclusion probable, sometimes *highly* probable, such as your expectation that your home will be where you left it this morning when you get back from work, but not certain. The claim that a negative can't be proven, while it's false stated that way, just means people can justify keeping on believing things they want to believe regardless of the evidence against them, because induction is not incontrovertible.
But Sir Joe's right that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. All of the arguments for and against Jesus' existence here are inductive, and therefore not bulletproof, so no final proof is possible. Scott made the claim in the OP that Jesus never existed, and offered a pretty good inductive argument in support of it, which amounts to this: if Jesus existed and did the extraordinary things ascribed to him in the New Testament, there should be contemporary accounts of his activities by other chroniclers. There are no such accounts, all we have is a few passing mentions of Jesus' followers behaving in ways that irritated the authorities, there's no evidence in the historical record outside the Bible that Jesus was real. Therefore Jesus (probably) didn't exist, at least not in the form and role ascribed to him by Christianity.
