quote:The Mons thing is contemporary and yet you can't find a single eye-witness.
No, but you can (still) find believers who will swear to its authenticity. The author of the story couldn't even convince people that he had made it up. To those people this rang of truth, and they would not be dissuaded.
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quote:Look - all the atheist arguments smack to me of moving goal posts. So let's drop "moving goal posts" it's rhetoric.
quote:Originally posted by Armoth:
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Armoth: if I can demonstrate to you why the event you describe does not constitute legitimate proof, will you renounce your faith?
I'm not sure it will be as simple as back and forth posting, but for rhetorical purposes, if you can undermine the strength of the mass revelation and the unbroken line of tradition toward that, I would have serious doubts.
The "goal post" was never disproving the exodus story, it was demonstrating that the "mass revelation and unbroken line of tradition" do not constitute a legitimate proof.
I don't see where that goal post has been moved.
Secondly, I'm not an atheist and see no flaw in believing something which is unproven and unprovable. But I do think there is harm in believing that something is proven and fully rational, when it is not.
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: And again, here's the difficulty. You need to come up with a plausible alternative where someone is convincing someone that their parents or grandparents experienced a mass revelation and never told you about it.
Just as an FYI, you have this in multiple forms now.
quote:If you want to say it didn't happen that way, so that the person needn't convince people with that high a standard - then you need to explain why other cultures did not evolve a similar myth.
Why? Think very carefully about this.
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posted
Here's a different line of questioning for Lisa, Armoth, et al.
In your Judaism, is "faith" a short cut to belief? Is it an epistemic matter in any way? Do you use the word faith at all to describe your Judaism?
Secondly, it is fairly common these days for Christian apologists to take a similar stance on faith. Christianity does not need "faith" as a short cut to belief; various apologetic arguments allegedly make Christians doctrines all but apodictically true.
However, these Christians reserve a place for faith - it is a matter of moral trust in God. Faith is about trusting God to fulfill various promises. Do you use the word faith in the same way?
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posted
Here's another hypothesis (in case we needed more):
1) The mass revelation story is first told as a metaphorical story, with the tellers knowing full well it didn't actually happen. It's a nice story, and is widely told.
2) Sometime in the next few hundred years it is considered to be a true story by those in charge of such things.
3) It is written down. (Could be before or after step 2)
No intentional deception needed. This sort of thing happens all the time, see George Washington's cherry tree or some other examples in this thread. You don't need to convince people that their grandfathers were at the revelation, you just need to get them to repeat the story. Their descendants will turn it into a "true story" eventually.
quote:And again, here's the difficulty. You need to come up with a plausible alternative where someone is convincing someone that their parents or grandparents experienced a mass revelation and never told you about it.
What's with the parents and grandparents? We are talking about 800 years between the claimed events and the written document. (And that's with modern chronology at that; nobody is going to check that carefully when they're sitting around the fire listening to founding myths. Do you fact-check everything you hear in a TV documentary?) 800 years is a lotta dang room. "Why didn't my great-great-great-great-grandfather tell me about this?" "Um, sweetheart, you may have noticed he's dead."
And again, that's with modern chronology, the careful reconstruction of scholars. As originally told, it would just be "A long time ago", before anyone now alive was born.
Further, there's no need to believe it was made up out of whole cloth. A volcanic eruption is by all accounts vastly impressive; put one of those next to a goatherder who can't read, and indeed he may well believe that a god spoke to him. The detailed interpretation would be what came later.
What's the alt. story you are going on? You're assuming that because the oldest Torah to date leaves an 800 year gap between the mass revelation and that version that the Torah was presented in that generation? That's your alt theory?
Assuming that is true, you don't have to convince parents and grandparents, but the Torah wasnt just 5 books, it included histories up until that point. What did the people believe at that time? How did you convince them that a God had appeared, crazy miracles had been performed, obligations had been incurred and that they hadn't heard about it until then?
I've already addressed the goatherder thing. You assume it's so easy to get a goatherder to believe anything, literally ANYTHING casting aspersions on all traditions of relating back to that time. Fine. You are pointing to what you believe to be a flaw in human nature. I ask again, if that is a flaw, then similar sorts of claims should have arisen in other places in the world when they did not.
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quote:If you want to say it didn't happen that way, so that the person needn't convince people with that high a standard - then you need to explain why other cultures did not evolve a similar myth.
Why? Could you explain the rationale? After all, you're claiming a far more singular event.
Let me tackle this one and address it to Samp as well:
How do we know that the holocaust happened? It didn't happen to us. How do we know that there were gas chambers? It didn't happen to us! And everyone who was gassed is presumably dead. There is evidence. What kind of evidence? Testimony, shoes, photos (many of them are the same photos), documentation - it's possible that all of that was faked. You and I were not there. In my life, I've only ever heard of the holocaust from teachers, grandparents who claim they were there, and the way society in general takes it for granted that it happened. Despite the fact that people try to discredit the holocaust, oddly enough, it isn't compelling enough to convince us not to believe when someone says that the gas chambers could not have happened because the gas that was used should left residue.
It's possible that everyone was lying and that evidence was forged. Plausible? Not so much.
Granted, Sinai doesn't have shoes or photos, but my point is this: Humans give credibility to things based on probability. I've never been to China, I don't a few people who have, and I believe that the place exists.
I believe that if a large number of people believe they all spoke to God and witnessed some crazy miracles and that the event was so fantastic that it had the effect of obligating them to a whole bunch of laws - I find that to be a very compelling source of information since I think it's very very hard to get people to believe something that crazy. I believe that trying to couch it in the obscurity of history is dishonest. ----------------- Now, if you want to undermine that logical assumption that: "It is difficult to get people to believe that a mass revelation had occurred, that they had together experienced many miracles and that the events obligated them in a number of burdensome obligations. or that it is difficult to get people to believe that it happened to their ancestors"
You have to present a reasonable alt. Your most reasonable alt has been that the story evolved. What means is that you are pointing to a flaw in human nature - that goat herders believe crazy things, or that myths evolve and people believe crazy stories.
What that does is undermine my assumption about human nature and the extent to which I find mass claims to be credible. That's cool. I don't believe Jesus was divine. But other, larger claims, I have not yet undermined their credibility. Some claims are just too big for me to believe that people believed them. I would have thought it is difficult to get people to believe in a man as a god, but I know that it happens a lot in history, so there you go.
But there are no other claims of a mass revelation, and so I have not yet altered my assumption about the credibility of a claim like that. If you say that humans are corruptible and you give them ample time and reason to have evolved such corrupted tales, I want to see other cultures that have evolved similarly. if you cannot demonstrate that, I still find it compelling to say that the claim is too fantastic, too big, does not stem from person, to be disbelieved.
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quote:I believe that if a large number of people believe they all spoke to God and witnessed some crazy miracles and that the event was so fantastic that it had the effect of obligating them to a whole bunch of laws -
But you don't have that. You have documentation written hundreds of years after the fact that people believed this. Can you see how very different that is?
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Ok, so chronology. Try this:
1000 BCE: A tribe of goatherders, about 1000 strong, witness a huge volcanic eruption. Their shaman tells them it is a sign to move north.
1000-950 BCE: The story is told and retold; as with the Angels of Mons, it acquires details that weren't originally present. Note that at no point do people lie; I refer you to the earlier quoted cases of people convincing themselves that X happened which actually didn't. Thus, when someone says "And the voice from the Heavens said thus-and-so", nobody objects; in fact, they heard it too.
950-250 BCE: The original witnesses are all dead. The priests, whose task it is to tell this story, add to what was spoken by the voice. The ten commandments arise in this period. The story of the golden calf is made up, at first without any specific time to it. At some point someone asks "when did this happen?" and is answered "It was just after the voice from the Heavens."
250 BCE: The much-modified, ornamented, and codified structure is written down for the first time.
How is this implausible?
See above for my gripe with 800 years.
I'm sorry, but for me, that actually looked kinda ridiculous and not plausible. Things take a lot more time than that. It took 325 years for a consensus to be reached that Jesus was divine. To evolve the entire Torah, all of the miracles that happened to a mass of people, a claim about the destruction of Egypt and the wars and miracles with nations that continued up until that point? The events in the Torah may have happened 800 years ago, what about the book of Prophets and Writings? Too much to evolve, too fast, and without any other similar types of evolutions happening anywhere else or ever again. The angel of mons comparable to the Torah? Seriously?
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quote:I believe that if a large number of people believe they all spoke to God and witnessed some crazy miracles and that the event was so fantastic that it had the effect of obligating them to a whole bunch of laws -
But you don't have that. You have documentation written hundreds of years after the fact that people believed this. Can you see how very different that is?
Your homework assignment. Write a book full of obligations and laws, miracles, and mass revelations. Convince a people that it happened to their ancestors.
Do it to some tribe in Africa or something. Have fun.
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quote:Originally posted by Amanecer: Armoth, you seem to be approaching this conversation as though we have one million journal entries of people all claiming that on the same day, in the same place God talked to them. I absolutely agree that this would be hard to refute and would be compelling.
But that's not what we have. We have a single old document that somewhat vaguely alludes to the idea that 800 years prior God appeared to the Jewish people. I actually went and read all of Exodus looking to find this reference and didn't. Then I googled "mass revelation" and found the verses in question, which appear to be in Deuteronomy 4 and 5. Christians, who believe Deuteronomy to be the word of God, do not seem to hold the same interpretation of these versus. Without your explanation of mass revelation, I would have read them as pertaining to God revealing himself to Moses and thus by extension the Jewish people. This is not apologetics, this is just how I would have understand it. So really, instead of a million journal entires, there is one interpretation of a few versus referencing something that happened almost a millenia prior. I have no desire to convince you that it didn't happen, but can't you see that this is not the overwhelmingly convincing case that you are suggesting?
I don't understand. What are you reading differently?
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quote:Your homework assignment. Write a book full of obligations and laws, miracles, and mass revelations. Convince a people that it happened to their ancestors.
Do it to some tribe in Africa or something. Have fun.
I actually was going to suggest a thought experiment in this direction earlier in the discussion. Make me the supreme ruler with loyal followers in a low tech setting, and I don't think it'd be very hard. I doubt I'd need even half of your 800 years.
Added:
Are you saying you couldn't do it? What would be stopping you?
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Foust: Here's a different line of questioning for Lisa, Armoth, et al.
In your Judaism, is "faith" a short cut to belief? Is it an epistemic matter in any way? Do you use the word faith at all to describe your Judaism?
Secondly, it is fairly common these days for Christian apologists to take a similar stance on faith. Christianity does not need "faith" as a short cut to belief; various apologetic arguments allegedly make Christians doctrines all but apodictically true.
However, these Christians reserve a place for faith - it is a matter of moral trust in God. Faith is about trusting God to fulfill various promises. Do you use the word faith in the same way?
pretty much. The same word in hebrew for "faith" is the word for loyalty - faithfulness.
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quote:I'm sorry, but for me, that actually looked kinda ridiculous and not plausible.
Listen to what you are saying. You are saying that it is more plausible that God appeared and gave people nonsensical rules on which an entire religion was eventually constructed than it is that people are capable of error.
Think about that for a second. Think about what you're calling "plausible." I think you'll conclude that your bias here has made you unable to fairly determine the sheer implausibility of Jewish doctrine. Remember what I mentioned earlier, about Card saying that one argument for the truth of the LDS church is that he found it more plausible that God had appeared to Joseph Smith and helped him translate some mysterious golden plates (which later vanished) than the idea that Smith produced a credible forgery?
Would you agree that it is more likely that God appeared to Joseph Smith as believed by Mormons than it is that Smith was a good writer?
quote:I ask again, if that is a flaw, then similar sorts of claims should have arisen in other places in the world when they did not.
Again: why? I think we have numerous examples of similar claims. What we have not presented, mainly for lack of contemporary evidence, is identical claims. That said, heck, the Torah is hardly the only book of scripture to claim a mass revelation visible to ancestors; after all, presumably everyone on Earth noticed the eclipse after the death of Jesus. How did they lie about that, just 200-some years after it supposedly happened?
quote:Your homework assignment. Write a book full of obligations and laws, miracles, and mass revelations. Convince a people that it happened to their ancestors.
Do it to some tribe in Africa or something.
How much time do I have to evolve those obligations and laws? Because, yeah, I have absolutely no doubt that this could be done within a couple generations, much less a thousand years.
quote:If you want to say it didn't happen that way, so that the person needn't convince people with that high a standard - then you need to explain why other cultures did not evolve a similar myth.
Why? Could you explain the rationale? After all, you're claiming a far more singular event.
Let me tackle this one and address it to Samp as well:
How do we know that the holocaust happened? It didn't happen to us. How do we know that there were gas chambers? It didn't happen to us! And everyone who was gassed is presumably dead. There is evidence. What kind of evidence? Testimony, shoes, photos (many of them are the same photos), documentation - it's possible that all of that was faked.
Much like when I asked you about mass revelation versus the moon landing (your latest abstruse comparison between something that happened thousands of years ago to something that happened in the modern, much more media infused era), do you honestly think that there's as much evidence for the mass revelation as there is for the holocaust?
Or, perhaps, might there be some difference between things that happened BC versus something that happened, say, within living memory in an era of mass media and stuff like 'video footage?'
quote:Your homework assignment. Write a book full of obligations and laws, miracles, and mass revelations. Convince a people that it happened to their ancestors.
Do it to some tribe in Africa or something.
Something like this could be done in, say, two generations. And it's certainly harder than it could have been than the mechanisms by which oral tradition and the purging of nonbelievers by force could transcribe an event of mass revelation into written history via a tribe of peoples living over two thousand years ago.
Not that we have to do this to cast doubt on the concept of the mass revelation being reliably, certifiably evidenced.
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posted
I'm glad this subject got the attention it deserved. It was unsurprisingly like I said, and I was also interested to discover the line fed to some orthodox jews, like armoth and lisa, isn't accepted by others. I asked a couple of rabbis who thought it was absolutely a matter of faith and personal belief. Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Parkour: I'm glad this subject got the attention it deserved. It was unsurprisingly like I said, and I was also interested to discover the line fed to some orthodox jews, like armoth and lisa, isn't accepted by others. I asked a couple of rabbis who thought it was absolutely a matter of faith and personal belief.
posted
I had inquired about this with members of the congregation har hashem. they were like 'lol no' but that would sort of be expected, I guess, given it's a Reform community.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Parkour: I'm glad this subject got the attention it deserved. It was unsurprisingly like I said, and I was also interested to discover the line fed to some orthodox jews, like armoth and lisa, isn't accepted by others. I asked a couple of rabbis who thought it was absolutely a matter of faith and personal belief.
I call BS.
Well, you would, wouldn't you. That's ok, they were very open and friendly and I respect their belief perfectly when it doesn't pretend to be backed up by irrefutable proof.
Whether or not you believe this transaction took place doesn't really matter to me, I've seen your lopsided standards of proof. Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009
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quote:I don't understand. What are you reading differently?
From Deuteronomy, Chapter 5:
quote: 1 Moses summoned all Israel and said: Hear, O Israel, the decrees and laws I declare in your hearing today. Learn them and be sure to follow them. 2 The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. 3 It was not with our fathers that the LORD made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today. 4 The LORD spoke to you face to face out of the fire on the mountain. 5 (At that time I stood between the LORD and you to declare to you the word of the LORD, because you were afraid of the fire and did not go up the mountain.)
With your explanation, I understand how you interpret this. But without that, I would have read it as the Lord revealing himself to the people of Israel via Moses. Verse 5 especially would have lent to that interpretation. I am not religious, so I am not holding up any interpretation as the right one. It just struck me odd that I'd never heard of the Mass Revelation before even though I was raised in an environment that considered the Old Testament to be gospel. I do not think that the text itself makes it particularly clear that a Mass Revelation happened.
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