The Absurdity of Atheism

The Buddha was not a god; he was not a messenger from a god; he was just a human. Buddhism does not call on its followers to worship the Buddha (or anything, for that matter), so one doesn’t have to worry about whether or not he really existed. Even if he didn’t exist, the teachings that he supposedly taught are still here. It’s kind of similar to how the Buddha responded to his disciples when they questioned whether there was a god or not. He refused to answer the question, because whether there was or not didn’t make any difference. They’d still all be in the same situation, facing the same life, with the same problems.

This is the important issue about Buddha - whether you agree or not that he existed doesn't make any difference. Buddha is not a god. It's about self-improvement.

Description of Red Herring

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.