quote: I mean, take the Christian geneaologies of JC at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. That's a contradiction.
Much in the same way that the second chapter of Genesis contradicts the first chapter of Genesis. I'm sure you have your explanation for why what appears to be a clear contradiction isn't really a contradiction but then Christians have their explanation for why the geneologies in Matthew and Luke aren't really contradictory either. Until you've bothered to do more than understand a very weak strawman of Christianity, you'd be better off laying off the mockery and red herrings.
Nah. Because I've heard such arguments, and they all founder on the rock of the religion they claim their religion derives from.
Certainly I would say that Christianity owes a great deal to Judaism. I would not say that it is derived from it, nor would I say that it is dependent on the claims being examined here. Others might; I would not.
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quote:And here is where it is actually compelling. Forget about bloodbaths and the like - you can't create a scenario where the ideas of one or two men evolves into a mass revelation in front of 2 million. That didn't happen with Christianity or Islam - it's not very plausible.
You're simply wrong about that. Here is a very compelling scenario.
Start with a nomadic tribe with a charismatic leader, not millions but a few hundred to perhaps a few thousand. They have a charismatic leader who has rallied them to leave. The group witnesses some spectacular natural phenomenon, perhaps an unusually violent thunderstorm, a wildfire, or a volcanic eruption. Like hundreds of other tribes around the world, the leader has a "revelation" about what this event means and what God wants them to do. He tells the rest of the tribe about his revelation. Because he is charismatic and everybody saw "something", its pretty easy to convince the whole tribe that they've seen God. From what we know about human senses, memory, the way groups work and the evolution of shared mythology, it's extremely plausible that one person might say "DId you hear that clap of thunder, it sounded just like a voice calling "Moses" and before long, everyone clearly remembers a voice calling the name of Moses. As the story is retold from year to year and then generation to generation, it gets embellished a little bit hear and a little bit there. Because of the way human memory works, no one really notices the changes because those shared story telling experiences alter the original memory. We know this happens. By the time the full story is written down, possibly hundreds of years after the original event the story bares little resemblance to what actually happened. The fact that many different peoples in different areas are telling the story the same way isn't proof of its veracity, it's simple evidence that these people interact with each other.
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quote:Originally posted by Xavier: I am a dictator of a small and primitive clan. I decide one day that to cement my power, I will devise a myth claiming that my rules were not created by me, but passed down by a deity.
I tell my trusted guards and lieutenants that my grandfather was visited by a deity and the rules were given to him and passed down to me.
One of my lieutenants goes a step further and says that his grandfather was there as well. I give him great favor for his ingenuity and support.
Others catch on and make similar claims that their ancestors were there. Before long, claiming to have an ancestor that was at the revelation becomes a requirement for favor by me.
Some doubt my claims. I threaten them with death or kill them outright. Most go along willingly enough. After all, my story gives them a divine right to the land we all occupy! Why question it?
My supporters pass these claims onto their children, as surely they must never waver in their dedication to me. The tale grows in the telling. It isn't many generations long before all sorts of embellishments are added.
Eventually, the current tale is encoded in scripture and becomes the basis for a religion.
Obviously this is just one possible way for this tale to develop (pulled from my rear), there are many other ways it could have happened, none relying on the supernatural.
I consider myself a pretty "unbiased and calm observer", but this national revelation story just doesn't seem to hold as much water as Judaism seems to think it does.
Again, most arguments against mass revelation come from compartmentalization of the ginormous story that the mass revelation is. How did it develop? When in history did this happen? The thing about the unbroken chain the mass revelation is that if you pick a point in time, we know the people and the stories of that particular generation. There are no dark ages where the story could have evolved the way you want it to.
Don't you see that it's reaaallly implausible to get an entire nation so zealously believing that their ancestors all heard God speak to them? And the level of effort demanded of us in the commandments as well?
Similar to Lisa - I've tried to walk away from this a few times, but I can't without lying to myself. You can't just say "belief involved" "kill people" and expect that a lie of that magnitude gets believed, and that the culture it produced is as boxed-in to that original and fantastic lie.
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Armoth: Let me re-phrase, if mass revelations are so compelling as opposed to single revelations, why is Judaism roughly 14 million people while both of the other two have more than a billion followers?
It seems to me that (especially if you throw in the other large religions as well) mass revelations *aren't* selected for.
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quote: I mean, take the Christian geneaologies of JC at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. That's a contradiction.
Much in the same way that the second chapter of Genesis contradicts the first chapter of Genesis. I'm sure you have your explanation for why what appears to be a clear contradiction isn't really a contradiction but then Christians have their explanation for why the geneologies in Matthew and Luke aren't really contradictory either. Until you've bothered to do more than understand a very weak strawman of Christianity, you'd be better off laying off the mockery and red herrings.
Nah. Because I've heard such arguments, and they all founder on the rock of the religion they claim their religion derives from.
Certainly I would say that Christianity owes a great deal to Judaism. I would not say that it is derived from it, nor would I say that it is dependent on the claims being examined here. Others might; I would not.
No offense, but you don't derive your beliefs from anything other than your heart. And while that is romantic, and I can even afford it a level of respect (as long as it doesn't harm others), it makes it difficult for me to join you in your belief unless you can demonstrate that your motivations should also become mine.
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quote:There are no dark ages where the story could have evolved the way you want it to.
There don't need to be any dark ages. Stories like this evolve very rapidly in the first generation itself. The only record of the first few generations after Moses, are the Jewish scripture and the oral tradition. There is no independent evidence corroborating what the Torah and the oral tradition say. The oldest surviving fragments of the Torah are from ~ 200 BCE, over a millennium after Sinai. There is no evidence outside the Torah and the oral tradition of an unbroken and unchanging line of transmission during those critical first centuries. The only evidence for unbroken transmission of this story, is the story itself. That's a tautology not sound reasoning.
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No offense, but that is not true. I derive my beliefs from all sorts of things. They are just not dependent on any particular one of those things. And I am not asking you to join me in anything, merely correcting what I consider to be a misstatement regarding Christianity. "Derives" is incorrect.
To put it another way, Judaism was good, fertile soil in which Christianity blossomed (and we owe it an enormous debt for that) but it was not the seed.
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quote:And here is where it is actually compelling. Forget about bloodbaths and the like - you can't create a scenario where the ideas of one or two men evolves into a mass revelation in front of 2 million. That didn't happen with Christianity or Islam - it's not very plausible.
You're simply wrong about that. Here is a very compelling scenario.
Start with a nomadic tribe with a charismatic leader, not millions but a few hundred to perhaps a few thousand. They have a charismatic leader who has rallied them to leave. The group witnesses some spectacular natural phenomenon, perhaps an unusually violent thunderstorm, a wildfire, or a volcanic eruption. Like hundreds of other tribes around the world, the leader has a "revelation" about what this event means and what God wants them to do. He tells the rest of the tribe about his revelation. Because he is charismatic and everybody saw "something", its pretty easy to convince the whole tribe that they've seen God. From what we know about human senses, memory, the way groups work and the evolution of shared mythology, it's extremely plausible that one person might say "DId you hear that clap of thunder, it sounded just like a voice calling "Moses" and before long, everyone clearly remembers a voice calling the name of Moses. As the story is retold from year to year and then generation to generation, it gets embellished a little bit hear and a little bit there. Because of the way human memory works, no one really notices the changes because those shared story telling experiences alter the original memory. We know this happens. By the time the full story is written down, possibly hundreds of years after the original event the story bares little resemblance to what actually happened. The fact that many different peoples in different areas are telling the story the same way isn't proof of its veracity, it's simple evidence that these people interact with each other.
When, in history, was it written down? I need to see which period in history it was, and whether that makes sense. The idea is that we know who was around in ever period, and again, there was no period of dark like that where the writing could be introduced.
What about the story of the Exodus? That gets added in ex post facto? Is that truly plausible?
Also, the Bible says that they heard the voice of God, saying actual words and everything. I don't see, even if you're really charismatic, how you can convince THOUSANDS of people that they heard prophecy? You also have the Bible discussing the fact that it was written down then, and not later (again, Christianity and Islam, it is not written down at the time of the prophet), which also lends a great deal of credibility and implausibility to its later introduction.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Armoth: Let me re-phrase, if mass revelations are so compelling as opposed to single revelations, why is Judaism roughly 14 million people while both of the other two have more than a billion followers?
It seems to me that (especially if you throw in the other large religions as well) mass revelations *aren't* selected for.
It was said before, I think by Raymond or by others - Humans hide from truth. Assume for a second the bible is true - you have the story of then golden calf - how the heck does that happen after a mass revelation? When I was younger, that used to annoy the hell out of me - but now that I'm older, I know how easy it is to compartmentalize, to hide from gnawing truths, not to look deeper when logic and reality demands that you should, and how I even defy in my day to day life the principles I know to be true. How do people smoke when they have circulatory issues? How come people can't stick to a diet? So few Jews believe because of the mass revelation anyways. Sadly, I don't think you can judge even Judaism by the Jews.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: No offense, but that is not true. I derive my beliefs from all sorts of things. They are just not dependent on any particular one of those things. And I am not asking you to join me in anything, merely correcting what I consider to be a misstatement regarding Christianity. "Derives" is incorrect.
To put it another way, Judaism was good, fertile soil in which Christianity blossomed (and we owe it an enormous debt for that) but it was not the seed.
I don't think many Christians believe the way you believe
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quote:Again, most arguments against mass revelation come from compartmentalization of the ginormous story that the mass revelation is. How did it develop? When in history did this happen? The thing about the unbroken chain the mass revelation is that if you pick a point in time, we know the people and the stories of that particular generation.
The flaw with this argument is that the only evidence you have for the stories being told in, for example, 1200 BCE are the stories relayed by people a thousand years later. There is no independent evidence that the people in 1200 BCE were telling the same story told in 200 BCE. The fact that the people in 200 BCE claimed that the stories came to them in a unbroken and unaltered chain from a 1000 years earlier is not evidence for the veracity of the claim.
In fact, the Bible itself reports events where the Law was "lost" and rediscovered. Based on the Biblical record itself, there is not an unbroken chain of millions of Jews repeating this story to their children and grandchildren. There are at least a few points when all but a few Jews in a given generation abandoned the Law so the stories had to be retaught, not by a million parents but by a tiny number of prophets. Those type of bottlenecking events dramatically weaken the strength of an unbroken chain representing millions of voices.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: No offense, but that is not true. I derive my beliefs from all sorts of things. They are just not dependent on any particular one of those things. And I am not asking you to join me in anything, merely correcting what I consider to be a misstatement regarding Christianity. "Derives" is incorrect.
To put it another way, Judaism was good, fertile soil in which Christianity blossomed (and we owe it an enormous debt for that) but it was not the seed.
I don't think many Christians believe the way you believe
Then your understanding of Christianity is very shallow. There are many many different ways that Christians view the Hebrew Bible and Judaism. kmboots view is a very prevalent one.
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quote:When, in history, was it written down? I need to see which period in history it was, and whether that makes sense.
Why? When the issue at hand is whether some people deliberately misled a bunch of other people and in so doing created a new oral tradition that eventually got written down, why does the exact date matter? Why wouldn't "some time before it was written down" suffice?
(Besides: why can't this, like the story of Josiah, be a bunch of hyperbole when read in context?)
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I don't think that people had to have been deliberately misled for the claims we are examining to be not factually accurate.
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Well, I dunno. At some point, someone had to decide to insert a detail they didn't know for sure was actually truthful.
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They might have believed it. Or it might have been misunderstood or misinterpreted somewhere down the line.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Well, I dunno. At some point, someone had to decide to insert a detail they didn't know for sure was actually truthful.
Not necessarily. I've heard numbers in anecdotes multiply by an order of magnitude in a single transmission with no indication that the teller was unsure of their facts.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: I don't think that people had to have been deliberately misled for the claims we are examining to be not factually accurate.
Yes. Wouldn't it only take some impetus (social, political, whatever) that would favor the non-truth, plus a lot of time, to produce a claim to become virtually (or even completely) false?
I can think of many.
In times of crisis and desolation, it's easy to take comfort in thinking that your people are special, or that the specific mistreatment is a test, or trial, or something similar.
In the political realm, it may make sense to favor one version of the story to another if it unites your people when they are threatened with fracturing.
When nations started to intermingle on a global scale, a sense of a greater identity must surely bring stability in some cases.
I don't have to think too hard to imagine that, with a lot of time, these things might turn and turn and turn a claim into something completely (or partly) fictitious.
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quote:When, in history, was it written down? I need to see which period in history it was, and whether that makes sense. The idea is that we know who was around in ever period, and again, there was no period of dark like that where the writing could be introduced.
We don't really know when the Torah was written down. According to the Torah and the Jewish tradition, it was written down by Moses on Mount Sinai but there is no corroborating evidence for this. Once again, using the Torah and the oral tradition as evidence that the Torah and oral tradition are true is not sound reasoning. The oldest existing fragments of the Torah are from ~200 BCE. Most scholars agree that at least some parts of the Torah were written well before then but there is no consensus as to when and how.
quote:What about the story of the Exodus? That gets added in ex post facto? Is that truly plausible?
Which part of the story of Exodus? I think its far more plausible to that many parts of the Exodus story have some roots in the truth but have been greatly exaggerated and embellished, than it is that the Egyptian records would make no mention of the fact that half the population of Egypt were Hebrew slaves who were suddenly freed and left.
quote:Also, the Bible says that they heard the voice of God, saying actual words and everything. I don't see, even if you're really charismatic, how you can convince THOUSANDS of people that they heard prophecy?
There are modern examples of exactly this kind of thing happening. For example, in the LDS church there is a story told that after the assassination of Joseph Smith there was a meeting of several thousand church members to decide the future of the Church. At this meeting, Brigham Young got up to speak and was "miraculously transformed" in to Joseph Smith before thousands of people. Thousands in the audience reported that he both looked, acted and spoke like Joseph Smith. Some of my great great grandparents were present in that meeting and told their children and grandparents about witnessing this miracle. If your argument is valid, then rationally this story has to be true as well.
The problem is that we actually have journals and records written at the time. From those journals we know that the meeting in question actually occurred and that Brigham Young actually spoke, but no one reported having seen him transform into Joseph Smith until long after the event occurred. Yet years later, thousands of people really believed it happened and they had seen it.
I'm not speculating here. We know from numerous modern examples that it is not only possible for thousands of people to remember seeing a miracle and hearing a voice that didn't actually happen, its actually really common. Whenever people gather to share such stories repeatedly, we should expect this kind of thing to happen. Common sense on this issue is wrong.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: No offense, but that is not true. I derive my beliefs from all sorts of things. They are just not dependent on any particular one of those things. And I am not asking you to join me in anything, merely correcting what I consider to be a misstatement regarding Christianity. "Derives" is incorrect.
To put it another way, Judaism was good, fertile soil in which Christianity blossomed (and we owe it an enormous debt for that) but it was not the seed.
True. That was the eastern mystery religions, like Mithra.
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quote:Again, most arguments against mass revelation come from compartmentalization of the ginormous story that the mass revelation is. How did it develop? When in history did this happen? The thing about the unbroken chain the mass revelation is that if you pick a point in time, we know the people and the stories of that particular generation.
The flaw with this argument is that the only evidence you have for the stories being told in, for example, 1200 BCE are the stories relayed by people a thousand years later. There is no independent evidence that the people in 1200 BCE were telling the same story told in 200 BCE. The fact that the people in 200 BCE claimed that the stories came to them in a unbroken and unaltered chain from a 1000 years earlier is not evidence for the veracity of the claim.
In fact, the Bible itself reports events where the Law was "lost" and rediscovered. Based on the Biblical record itself, there is not an unbroken chain of millions of Jews repeating this story to their children and grandchildren. There are at least a few points when all but a few Jews in a given generation abandoned the Law so the stories had to be retaught, not by a million parents but by a tiny number of prophets. Those type of bottlenecking events dramatically weaken the strength of an unbroken chain representing millions of voices.
You're right that there was bottlenecking - the strength of millions lies in the the fact that it it is difficult to convince 2 million people that they spoke to God, and difficult to convince people that there were 2 million of their parents, grandparents or ancestors who experienced the same.
But that doesn't change the fact that one point the story of a mass revelation circulates. Here is the sticking point for me - I find it less plausible to go with an evolved explanation than to believe the truth of the Bible. It's not just the mass revelation, which is strong enough, in itself, it's the commandments that come along with it, the 10 plagues, the splitting of the sea, the drowning of the Egyptian army, the claim of the spoils they received, the riches they acquired - so many times they could have been all - um, my parents didnt tell me any of that, or really? So where is this wealth now? Or - are you people serious? We can't work the land for a full year? I still have a hard time picturing that just up and evolve.
Let me grant the fact that there is no independent verification of a period of about 800 years - that is only a couple of generations. It doesn't seem like long enough time for the story to evolve the way it would need to. And even at the end of it, I need a plausible explanation for how the group a few centuries BCE decided to believe the Torah if it hadn't happened? If they, themselves, hadn't heard those things told to them?
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: In fact, the Bible itself reports events where the Law was "lost" and rediscovered.
No, it doesn't. I assume you're referring to Josiah. All that tells us is that in Menasseh and Amon's capital city and seat of power, they were able to prevent the Torah from being widely learned. And needless to say, they didn't teach it to their son/grandson Josiah.
We've been through this. Menasseh reigned for 55 years, and Amon for 2. And Josiah was 18 when he began his reforms. So we're talking 75 years of that. The Soviet Union only lasted 70, and the depths of Jewish ignorance among most Jews there, particularly in areas like Leningrad and Moscow (power centers) was beyond belief. And yet people in more outlying areas continued to learn, and even people in urban areas did so in private.
I know the Josiah is a big thing among people who poo-poo the Tanakh, but it's not what you think it is.
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quote:When, in history, was it written down? I need to see which period in history it was, and whether that makes sense.
Why? When the issue at hand is whether some people deliberately misled a bunch of other people and in so doing created a new oral tradition that eventually got written down, why does the exact date matter? Why wouldn't "some time before it was written down" suffice?
You're dodging. Roughly, then. Are you talking about the late monarchy in Judah? Are you talking about the return to Zion during the Persian Empire? Are you talking about Hellenistic times, Hasmonean times, Roman times, Byzantine times, Muslim times? You're coming up with a cockamamie story of how things might have happened, and the milieu in which your story is supposed to have taken place absolutely does matter when it comes to judging its reasonableness.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: (Besides: why can't this, like the story of Josiah, be a bunch of hyperbole when read in context?)
What are you talking about? What story of Josiah is a bunch of hyperbole when read in context?
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quote: I find it less plausible to go with an evolved explanation than to believe the truth of the Bible.
Did you just say that the tales of the Bible are so outlandish -- the plagues, the Red Sea, etc. -- that you find it easier to believe that they happened than that they were made up?
quote:Let me grant the fact that there is no independent verification of a period of about 800 years - that is only a couple of generations.
Um....No. That's about 40 generations.
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quote:You're dodging. Roughly, then. Are you talking about the late monarchy in Judah? Are you talking about the return to Zion during the Persian Empire?
Nah. Let's say it happened well before the fall of Egypt. Again: why would it matter?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Well, I dunno. At some point, someone had to decide to insert a detail they didn't know for sure was actually truthful.
Not necessarily. I've heard numbers in anecdotes multiply by an order of magnitude in a single transmission with no indication that the teller was unsure of their facts.
Me too. On an individual basis. And I've seen everyone laughing about it. Or at the person who did it.
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quote:I know the Josiah is a big thing among people who poo-poo the Tanakh...
I get the sense that this is a sore spot for some Orthodox. Is there a fairly broad class of Josiah apologetics?
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quote:When, in history, was it written down? I need to see which period in history it was, and whether that makes sense.
Why? When the issue at hand is whether some people deliberately misled a bunch of other people and in so doing created a new oral tradition that eventually got written down, why does the exact date matter? Why wouldn't "some time before it was written down" suffice?
(Besides: why can't this, like the story of Josiah, be a bunch of hyperbole when read in context?)
The issue with time is that we know who was around at the time and you have to answer how it was plausible to get them to believe in a mass revelation, when it did not, in fact, happen.
The story of Josiah, in context, even read with teh slant that some people didn't know what a Torah was, still makes reference to the "people of God" people who lived underground with the prophetess Hulda who perpetuate the line back to Sinai. And there again, the simplest explanation to me is that the people had abandoned God's ways, and this resurfacing of something they all had heard about or known about as part of a national identity caused their repentance. I think it's crazy to say that they found a scroll that talked about a mass revelation that they had never heard about from their parents, so they all rend their garments, toss out their idols and join this new dude in his faith.
Makes much more sense to say that they repentend and the holiday was never celebrated as vigorously until that point.
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quote:The issue with time is that we know who was around at the time...
No, you don't. You know who the Bible says was around at the time. You cannot name the 600,000 men who were presumably at Sinai. You can't even really say how many of them there were. You can't even be sure which Pharoah was Pharoah. And even then, those details -- if they were known -- would just be establishing the earliest bound for this particular version of the story.
And when it comes to the most recent bound, well, that doesn't matter at all. The more ancient the story, the more easily corrupted. It's far easier to pick at this claim the farther back you push it.
quote:this resurfacing of something they all had heard about or known about as part of a national identity caused their repentance
Think about that for a second. Now think harder about it. Can you not for a moment imagine how easily something like that might be exploited to invent a creation myth?
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A generation doesn't start when the previous batch dies. 800 years is a very, very long time, especially for a pre-literate people. It's only taken 50 years for the Palestinians to insist that Israel has "always" been theirs. Those horrible little schools training Palestinian children to hate Jews and fire guns, those are a recent phenomenon. Do you think the kids all know their parents and grandparents are lying about their history? And how many of those kids are in fact being told the truth, but are relegated to the sidelines because the truth simply isn't as compelling a narrative?
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: It was said before, I think by Raymond or by others - Humans hide from truth.
(Conversation may have moved on) Again, as I said in my first note, I'm not talking about truth. I'm talking about the things that you brought up like the evolution of religion and whether it is in their interest to develop a story about mass revelation.
I mean, I get that you like mass revelations, but it doesn't seem to be a terribly fit thing for a religion to evolve.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: [Um....No. That's about 40 generations.
You're assuming people lived for 20 years? I'm assuming they lived 70. - that's 11 or 12 generations.
Ok, and even accepting that number, just how much word-of-mouth information do you have about what your family, any part of it, was doing around 1200? Do you even know what country they lived in?
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quote:You're right that there was bottlenecking - the strength of millions lies in the the fact that it it is difficult to convince 2 million people that they spoke to God, and difficult to convince people that there were 2 million of their parents, grandparents or ancestors who experienced the same.
It is very difficult to convince two million people that they spoke to god; it is not very difficult to enshrine the notion into the minds of descendants of those who once, supposedly, spoke to god and put this down into an official mythological record. We've already moved to the point where you're calling it 'difficult,' but as the point has repeatedly been made, this is not impossible.
Nor, when you think about it enough, is it improbable.
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How many of us, after all, vividly recall the famous line "It doesn't do anything; that's the beauty of it!"
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So Armoth, you went very quiet. Just how much hard information do you have about your many-greats grandfather 800 years ago? Or, for that matter, about your once-great grandfather, 90 years ago? If I told you he had been in the BEF at Mons and had personally seen the ghostly archers show up to drive off the Germans (speaking of miracles witnessed by many people...) would you be able to refute me?
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: So Armoth, you went very quiet. Just how much hard information do you have about your many-greats grandfather 800 years ago? Or, for that matter, about your once-great grandfather, 90 years ago? If I told you he had been in the BEF at Mons and had personally seen the ghostly archers show up to drive off the Germans (speaking of miracles witnessed by many people...) would you be able to refute me?
I don't quite know what you're talking about. I don't even know who my great great grandfather was 800 years ago.
That's not the point. The point is that when you have a people claiming a mass revelation you need to come up with a story as to why it is plausible that someone convinced a people that there was a mass revelation, or as to how the story developed.
I think it is natural to convince people that something happened to one person. But not to an entire nation, and not to their ancestors. If you say that such stories evolve, there should be other religions who have evolved a mass revelation. If it is a flaw in human nature - similar claims should have surfaced in other places.
I place a value on evidence that is transmitted through people, when I believe it is the type of evidence that isn't corrupted in origin or transmission. Offerings of possibilities that something did not occur does not make it probable that something did not occur.
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But knowledge of the frequency with which groups of people come to believe extraordinary things that are NOT true gives us a baseline probability estimate. And that base estimate is, to say the least, significantly less than 50%.
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"Things that are not true" is too broad. That line of reasoning ultimately discredits believing anyone when they say anything. There are things and circumstances which makes believing a human being more and less believable.
Posts: 1604 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Also, the Bible says that they heard the voice of God, saying actual words and everything. I don't see, even if you're really charismatic, how you can convince THOUSANDS of people that they heard prophecy?
quote:You're right that there was bottlenecking - the strength of millions lies in the the fact that it it is difficult to convince 2 million people that they spoke to God, and difficult to convince people that there were 2 million of their parents, grandparents or ancestors who experienced the same.
That certainly looks to me like a claim that knowledge of the ancestors' activity is important.
quote:I think it is natural to convince people that something happened to one person. But not to an entire nation, and not to their ancestors.
Why not? Again I point you to the Angels at Mons. This is within living memory; and sober, sensible newspapers not given to sensationalism did in fact report that British soldiers had seen ghostly apparitions appear in the skies and fire flaming arrows at the Germans. What should prevent me from forming a religion around that today? What is it that would cause people not to believe me, if I said this had happened to their ancestors?
Again: People have been convinced that events where they were personally present happened differently from what was actually the case. Their distant ancestors? Give me a break. And note, too, that we are speaking of pre-literate goat-herders. The habits of skepticism and source-criticism that children of the Internet age bring to bear as a matter of course didn't exist. The likes of Herodotus would blithely report the weirdest rumours about any nation they hadn't personally seen; if you got the caveat that they hadn't witnessed it themselves, you were lucky.
Let me also point this out: We are discussing this 2-million number as a difficulty; but is that what would happen if you were told the story? The rabbi, or whatever, is going "forty and six thousand from the tribe of X", and so on, and concluding with six-hundred-thousand; are you going to interrupt and say "Hang on, that's a lot of people, what did they all eat?" or are you going to pay attention to the founding myth of the tribe? I rather suspect that numerate boys who expressed skepticism might have found themselves going to bed without their supper; no need to postulate massacres, although that may have happened too.
You are taking a modern habit of thought, assuming that illiterate peasants had it too, and concluding that nobody could have got away with telling such whoppers. Did nobody ever tell you about the Big Lie? What's so special about a claim of millions, that it wouldn't be believed?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:If you say that such stories evolve, there should be other religions who have evolved a mass revelation. If it is a flaw in human nature - similar claims should have surfaced in other places.
They have. Many times. I noticed that you didn't respond to KoM's example of the Angels of Mons. Haven't you ever heard someone tell an urban legend prefaced with the phrase "This really happened to me" or "this really happened to a guy I know?"
People who don't believe often dismiss the story (thus the believers become the majority), or retell it with themselves as protagonist. People who do believe keep retelling the story. And even they embellish the story with conjecture and wishful thinking.
The only real point here (with respect to Judaism) is that the roots of truth are completely lost in the fog of history. Stories change too much to put faith in an account from 1914, much less B.C.E.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote:... you need to come up with a story as to why it is plausible that someone convinced a people that there was a mass revelation, or as to how the story developed.
I thought I came up with one such a story fairly easily. Your response of "when could this of happened?" smacked to me of moving the goal posts, and seemed easily addressed by Tom.
Then the conversation died.
Now of course I don't expect we'll actually get you to change your mind, but some acknowledgment of the previous discourse would at least be encouraged.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
The Mons thing is contemporary and yet you can't find a single eye-witness.
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.
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.
As to your point about pre-literate goat herders - I still don't find it compelling. Actually, it sounds more apologetic on your side than on mine. Firstly, because I still don't think you can convince and obligate a nation of illiterate goat-herders. Secondly, again, if this is a human flaw in the ancient times, why is Judaism the only religion that claims a mass revelation. Were the Israelite goat-herders the stupidest of all the goat-herders? (It's also worth-noting that Judaism has always had an extremely high literacy rate, but then we get to chicken and egg arguments)
As for your myth-number argument - You already know what I'm going to say. How did it start? How did it evolve? And if it evolved, why hasn't humanity evolved similarly?
You can't just undermine all human knowledge that hasn't been personally derived just because humans have the ability to lie. There are plausible lies and truths that it is implausible to lie about. We believe the latter, and reject the former. We all do it everyday.
Posts: 1604 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:... you need to come up with a story as to why it is plausible that someone convinced a people that there was a mass revelation, or as to how the story developed.
I thought I came up with one such a story fairly easily. Your response of "when could this of happened?" smacked to me of moving the goal posts, and seemed easily addressed by Tom.
Then the conversation died.
Now of course I don't expect we'll actually get you to change your mind, but some acknowledgment of the previous discourse would at least be encouraged.
Look - all the atheist arguments smack to me of moving goal posts. So let's drop "moving goal posts" it's rhetoric.
"When could this have happened" is all about plausibility. If it happened in 1492, then along with the history we are told about what happened until 1492, we need to now explain how everything we thought happened until 1492 didn't happen. That's why we ask when it could have happened. As you can see, the alternative explanations will vacillate in their levels of compellingness depending on when you place the alt story.
Lastly - This conversation waned when the Jews had holiday. Chillax.
Posts: 1604 | Registered: Mar 2003
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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.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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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.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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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?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
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?
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:"Things that are not true" is too broad. That line of reasoning ultimately discredits believing anyone when they say anything. There are things and circumstances which makes believing a human being more and less believable.
It is a reason to be skeptical of anyone who claims something that has no evidence in favor of it beyond their own say so.
The average claim has loads of evidence behind. "I found a penny" is backed by the numerous pennies that I have personally found. In this case, not only is there no other evidence, but a particular lack of evidence in places there shouldn't any [lack of evidence].
As for "goal posts," I'm not sure what your original goalposts actually were. I recall you saying you would change your beliefs if we could prove that the event transpired in some manner other than actual mass revelation. People HAVE moved that goalpost because its an unreasonable one. We shouldn't have to prove anything. We should merely have to provide alternate explanations (of which there have been many offered). Each of those explanations have some approximate probability. The probability of all the available explanations (including "and anything else we haven't thought of") adds up to 100%.
If we have no prior knowledge, then one generally starts the base probabilities as equal. In which case Mass Revelation would be less than 50%, since there are more than two competing theories put forth in this thread alone. And several of those theories are based on known evidence that people's memories ARE incredibly mutable, within single lifetimes let alone hundreds of years. For Mass Revelation to have higher than average probability, there needs to be a better reason than "there's no plausible alternative explanations."
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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