He didn’t deign to respond to my criticism but I’m guessing that he thinks belief trumps observable fact - as long as “everyone” (ie, everyone who matters) believes it.
You don’t actually know what “straw man” means, do you?
Diogenes’ post doesn’t say you believed the Hebrews were the Hyksos.
It would not be a form of evidence in itself and has no persuasive power. We know 2nd Temple existed from actual corroborating arcvhaeological and documentary evidence, not from “national hearsay” (whatever that is).
By not finding things they should be expected to be found, by showing provable anachronisms in the Exodus story (place names that did not exist at the alleged time of the Exodus), and by showing positive proof that the Israelites did not emerge from indigenous Canaanite tribes until well after they were supposedly taken as slaves in Egypt.
The Bible also says the Isrealites were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, yet not a single trace of them has been found archaeologically in Egypt. Trying to say the Egyptians covered it up because they were embarrased, aside from being ad hoc scrambling is also ludicrous in that it isn’t ossible to hide 400 years of archaeological history. That would be like us deciding we wanted to hide all evidence of the presence of African peoples in the Americas since colonial times. Hide it how?
For that matter who were the Egyptians supposed to be hiding this evidence FROM? This a patently ridiculous angle to take. The Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt. Sorry. never happened. And they never wandered in the Sinai either. Two million people leave evdience. This is a case where absence of evidence (not a single trace of human presence in the Sinai has been found in the relevant periods) is indeed evidence of absence. Archaeologists can ancient remains of camp fires from small bands of people (though not from the time of the alleged Exodus), yet they can’t find a single potsherd, bone or sign of human habitation of 2 million people living at Kanesh Barnea for 38 years? Give me a break.
What is meant by “evidence for the Torah?”
Evidence for evolution actually exists. What is meant by “evidence for the Torah?” What specific evidence are you talking about?
No. Evidence is evidence. Evolution is a proven fact. The Torah is provably ahistorical.
I didn’t say anybody thought the Hebrews were the Hyksos, I’m saying that’s likely the historical event whih served as a vague template for the later Henrew fiction.
It’s not true that scholars still believe that “Hebrew” comes from “Habiru,” by the way. It is now know that “habiru” refered to a social class, not an ethnic group. The Habiru were peoples who lived on the fringes of cities, were generally seens as scruffy, outlaw types and who were sometimes employed as mercenaries in wars. The Habiru/Hebrew connection is no longer widely accepted.
No. He thinks that belief trumps observable fact-as long as he believes that “everyone”(i.e. everyone who matters) believes it.
Why don’t you show us a case of “national hearsay” which has been shown to be true, and we’ll go from there.
They weren’t even successful at concealing Akhenaten, though, were they? So how did they manage to conceal 400 years of Israelite slavery even from the rigors and technology of modern day archaeology?
Claimed they were Kenyans? 
Moving to Great Debates.
Dio, you need to dial it back. Whether the archaeological evidence exists for something or not isn’t conclusive proof that it never happened, or that legends involving supernatural events don’t still have a kernel of truth. Calling bullshit on one of the major scriptures of a world religion is out of place in a thread debating aspects of debate within that religion.
It is not out of place when that very historicity is what is being debated, and the events of the Exodus can, and have been conclusively disproven by archaeology and are no longer accepted as historical by archaeologists and historians.
This is a thread where a “proof” of the truth of a religion is being inferred from a premise that a story in the Bible is true. That story is not true, and seminal, historical precursors to the myth (possible “kernels of truth”) are not germane to THIS debate since the proof being debated relies on a wholesale acceptance of this particular story being historically true essentially as it is described in the Bible. This event did not happen. It provably did not happen, and demonstrating the ahistoricity of the story is a perfectly legitimate refutation of the proof being offered.
If all you really object to is my use of the word “bullshit,” the fine, I’ll just say “fiction.”
Your claim is demonstrably false, as I can produce upon request Jews who did not see the Temple in Jerusalem. The “Nation” didn’t see the temple: the nation neither has eyes nor the neurons necessary to process visual impulses. It’s individual humans who have that.
What we have is a bottleneck:
- Some number of individuals saw the temple.
- Some MUCH SMALLER NUMBER of individuals wrote about a bunch of people seeing the temple.
- A heckuva lot of individuals believe what those writers wrote.
The writers are the bottleneck. There’s no nation that can engage in hearsay; there are just a bunch of people.
Secondly, by your standard, can I not point to the national hearsay of Iceland that says they see fairies? The entire nation of Iceland (minus people who disagree) believe they have seen fairies, just like the entire nation of Israel (minus people who disagree) believe their ancestors were led to the promised land by Moses. Are we not to believe that fairies therefore exist?
I really need to get another subscription to biblical archaeology. Not sure why I let it lapse in the first place. Anyway, thanks for that bit of info. This was a popular notion in the 70’s and maybe 80’s. It’s always a pleasure to get the straight dope.
I don’t think he would argue that it’s complete fiction. Even the story of the flood has some basis in fact, it’s just very attenuated.
Another think to remember is that ancients didn’t have the same idea about objectively recording events that we do. Hell, even circumspect and well written modern histories aren’t completely devoid of bias. Everybody has an ax to grind whether they realize it or not.
The people who wrote down these stories did so from an oral tradition. The problem is that later generations ask questions that aren’t part of the original story and so the story gets embellished. Just look at the canonical gospels. The presumed earliest gospel, Mark, is the shortest. The others are much longer. Then look at aprocryphal texts like the gospel of Thomas from the gnostic Nag Hamadi library and it’s a numbered list of Jesus’s sayings - no story, no background, nada.
But it’s not like the people altering the oral tradition are liars. They believe what they’re saying based upon deciding what must have happened. They just don’t see those types of conclusions as being non-factual.
I hope you’re not going to start bad mouthing fairies.
And BTW, fairies are real. 
Abele’s response to me didn’t seem especially cogent, but welcome to The Straight Dope anyways! 
Find a Christian apologist to argue with him re: all the witnesses who saw Jesus perform miracles, resurrect, and ascend into heaven. Popcorn is recommended.
Since I am fighting a war, on my own, against a brigade of “brights” I simply don’t have the time to respond to all of the points. I will try my best, however.
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Diogenes: They didn’t succeed with in completely erasing the existence for Anhekantan, because he built, like many pharoah’s, many monuments about himself. Still, they almost succeeded. However, why would THEY EVEN BUILD A MONUMENT TO ISRAELIES WHO WERE THEIR SLAVES? Interestingly, there is one measly mention of the Habiru’s. Your scholars GUESS that they weren’t the Hebrews. My scholars GUESS that they were (yes, archeology is all about taking guesses). Here we have a group of people - the Habiru - and we have one stinky mention of that group. This should make your VERY WARY about using the “absense of evidence” route for disproving historical events.
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Regarding “really not that bright”'s point that I haven’t shown that national hearsay can be true, I believe I did in the case of the Temple in Jerusalem. I assume you believe that there was a Temple in Jerusalem, don’t you?
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Do the Irish believe that SAW fairies? Or do they believe that fairies exist? Furthermore, we know that people are capable of hallucinating. Are you claiming that the Jewish national history of 14,600 days was a hallucination, and, if so, can you please point to a large number of people that hallucinated for that long of a period of time?
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This is my evidence, and I will have to repeat myself: The Jewish people believe that A) Millions of their own ancestors; B) Saw extended miracles for 14,600 days (this would negate the possiblity of hallucination; C) Which was believed to have been commemorated from the time of the miracles until today with such commandments such as Passover, Philacteries (Jews wear black boxes which contain the miraculous exodus story in it), Sabbath, Sabbatical Years; Tzitzit; Yom Kippur; The Festival of Booths; etc.; D) These commemorations are burdensome; E) The nation who believes it are moral, intelligent, genealogical and litterate. That is our evidence. This belief has never shown itself to be fallible. Therefore, we have no reason to assume that it can be falsified.
Simply because the broad brushing makes me mildly uncomfortable, I’d like to point out that quite a few Jews do not subscribe to abele’s cosmology, epistemology or theology.
I’d go further and state that, for this Jew, I see some disturbing parallels between such rationalizations and the worst nonsense to come out of Christian fundamentalists.
/$.02
abele, I appreciate that you are attempting to discuss this in good faith. It’s not often we get anyone new around here who can discuss fringe beliefs cogently.
Let’s break things down into smaller chunks. Perhaps that will make it easier to understand where we disagree.
I am inclined to believe the number of Israelites who wandered the desert (if any) did not number in the millions. Modern desert nomads rarely travel in groups larger than a hundred.
I doubt that desert nomads are overly concerned with keeping time. How would they know that exactly 40 years had passed? In any event, I don’t understand why their belief that miracles occurred over 14,600 days negates the possibility of hallucination.
I will assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that all of these celebrations date from the time of the exodus.
No they aren’t. Every culture has similar traditions. Far from being burdensome, they serve important sociological purposes (especially the Sabbath). Anyway, so what if they’re burdensome? What does that prove?
Why does it matter if they are “moral”? Using the word genealogical doesn’t make sense in this context, but I assume you mean they keep track of their family trees.
I’m not sure anyone in this thread identifies as a “bright” - that’s a strawman.
Except, you know, for leaving his entire capital city…
We’re not talking about monuments. Perhaps tombs from the first years of the sojourn in Egypt (you know, when they were still the First Advisor Joseph’s beloved family and not slaves? Hell, a tomb for Joseph would be nifty…Or any other subsequent evidence. 400 years is a lot longer than Akhenaton was around. Mundane evidence would add up. 2 million people don’t just up and leave a country without evidence.
No, it isn’t. It’s about examining material and other evidence and working from there.
They didn’t come close, actually.
Why do you think that monuments are the only archaeological or documentary evidence that would be left of the 400 year presence of a cultural group numbering in the millions? Where are the communities, graves and inscriptions? Where are the state records dealing with them? Most of the evidence after 400 years would already have been buried underground before the Israelites even left. Do you think the Egyptians systematically dug up every bit of this 400 year archaeological history of the Israelites in Egypt and destroyed it? This is quite an extraordinary claim, since it’s not something that could be done even in modern times
We have far more than one mention of them, and it’s not one group, but a social class mention over many centuries in many different civilizations and contexts. Educate yourself.
There was a Second Temple, but the reason we know this has nothing to do with any “national hearsay,” but actual physical and independent documentary evidence. By contrast, we have never confirmed a First Temple because we have no archaeological evidence or contemporary corroborating documentary evidence. Granted, archaeologists have not been allowed to dig much on the site, and the existence of a First Temple is still generally assumed as a probability, but the Bible is not good enough evidence to call it a fact, and neither is any kind of imagined “national hearsay.”
There are many cultures which have believed they literally saw such things. Indiia is filled with all kind of mass witnessing of Hindu gods and miracles, even today.
What some Jews “believe” is evidence of nothing. All religions have commemorative religious rituals. All such rituals could be called “burdensome.” Intelligence is neither here nor there (it’s hilarious that you misspelled “literate,” though). Smart people can have religious beliefes, but those religious beliefs are not evidnce. The Exodus story is part of a literary national origin myth, at least partially syncretized from some pre-existing tribal myths, but it is not history, and people believing it doesn’t prove it’s history any more than hundreds of millions of Hindus believing literally in the “historical” events of the Mahabharata makes it true.
I’ll make it easy for our guest. Point me to any proof, solid physical proof, that any large group of people spent any period of years at any point in time in the Sinai desert, and I’ll concede the rest of the points gratis.
If you can’t even do that much and the best you’ve got is some pretzel logic argument that relies upon what SOME Jews believe either now, the distant past or anywhere in between, then you have no argument at all.
If you think my words are harsh, let’s take this quote: “We claim that a national HISTORY, which was believed to have been seen by millions of a nations ancestry, has never shown itself to be false. Since this historical belief has never shown itself to be false, we have no reason to assume that such a belief is fallible.”
So, your argument is that if something hasn’t been proved to be false, we have therefore proved that it is true.
Maybe the term “pretzel logic” is overly generous.