You just made that up. They do tell us when the myth takes place, a bit before the city was founded according to their founding myth (the founding of the city is the commemoration). That’s 1325.
Nice talking to you.
If no one is claiming that the Kuzari proof is infallible, then by definition everyone is claiming that it is fallible. Either you are mistaken in your use of “fallible” and your argument is simply that “national, commemorated history” has shown itself to be reliable evidence, or you’re claiming that we must assume that “national, commemorated history” is impervious to disproof until shown otherwise.
The second claim is not coherent; the first is up for argument. Have any other supernatural events been recorded by “national, commemorated history”? If not, it seems to me that you don’t have much statistical power here.
Stop getting our hopes up like this.
I will focus on Bpelta’s points.
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Regarding the Aztek myth, you are correct that they mention the date, the 13th century. Therefore, can you please mention the citation which states that in the 13th century there were 10,000 Azteks. More specifically, because there may have been many Aztek tribes, please mention the citation which claims the number of people in this tribe.
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How do you know that the Aztek’s believed the myth? Maybe it was like the American Santa myth? More specifically, how do you know that they believed the miraculous details of the myth?
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Which perpetual commemorations did you mention? Furthermore, how is builing a city a commemoration of the miracles? (I.e., how does a city remind you of the story? Everyone builds cities!) Regarding the Torah, the Jews believe that millions of their ancestors were commanded to teach the Exodus story to their children, to “redeem their firstborn” which commemorates the dying of the firstborn in egypt, to verbalize the Exodus story once (and, according to the Talmud, twice) a day, to live in booths to commemorate their stay in the desert, etc., etc.
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Do you not agree that 10,000 is noticably smaller than 2,000,000? If so, at most, you are showing that noticeably smaller numbers can be made up.
Aztec. Aztek is a car.
I wonder if someday we will have a celebration to commemorate this miraculous movement of the goal posts. abele derer, where is your proof that there were two million Israelites wandering around the desert?
Regarding the Yahweh myth, can you please give citation that there were 2,000,000 Jews who saw the miracle?
How do you know the Jews believed the myth? Maybe it was like the American Santa myth? More specifically, how do you know that they believed the miraculous detail of the myth?
Yes, but how do you know they really believed it? All of them? Maybe it’s like the American myth about George Washington and the cherry tree? Everyone learns it, but everyone knows that it’s really not true.
How do we know the 2,000,000 hasn’t been made up? Do we actually have 2,000,000 accounts? Or is there just a few that make claims of 2,000,000? Do all of these account agree in all details? If 10,000 isn’t enough, what is? 20,000? 50,000? 1,000,000? Why or why not would all of these numbers be enough to demonstrate INFALLIBLE EVIDENCE?
Anything you use to question another religious belief can be used to question your own. Anything used to support your religious belief can be used to support others. ‘Lots of people believed it’ is not proof. ‘This one guy says lots of people saw it’ is not proof. Lots of people believed in the Egyptian religion, more than 2,000,000. So if that’s your magic number, then I guess they win.
Oh yeah, well billions of Xenu’s people witnessed their destruction by hydrogen bombs and volcanoes.
Infallible evidence that Judaism is a lie, because Scientology is the one true religion.
At least that’s what Abele’s childish approximation of logic would suggest.
One guy wrote it down many generations after it happened. Duh.
I am responding only to Bpelta. He seems to be the only one who at least understands the logic of Kuzari’s proof. For everyone else, you are invited for the ride.
- I have been doing a bit more research on the Aztec - not “Aztek” - myth (thank you left hand for pointing out my error). The issue is numbers. I agree there may have been many people living in Mexico at the time. The issue, therefore, is how many people DID THE AZTEC’s believe saw the myth. We don’t know. It may have been 25; it may have been 2 million. Since we don’t know, we haven’t refuted the Kuzari’s proof.
That being said, we do have a hint that THEY, the Aztec’s themselves, believed that there were only a few people on the journey. First, at the start of their journey all the Aztec’s “met in a cave.” Lous Warburton Aztec Civilization pg. 23. Since too many people cannot fit into one cave, they presumably thought that there weren’t that many people on the journey. True, this is only a slight clue, since they may have believed that the cave was massive. Nevertheless, it appears that the Aztec’s themselves believed that there weren’t too many people on the journey.
2. The second issue is whether people actually believed the MIRACLES (the journey doesn’t imply that there were miracles) that took place on the journey. Yes, people wrote down the Aztec journey, but how do we know that people believed it? Indeed, “the Aztec’s are known to have deliberately REVISED their own history to glorify their past.” Id. at 24. In other words, when people wrote that they saw “white raisins” did they actually believe that they saw white raisin? We can never know for sure. People often write things that they themselves don’t believe, but one thing we do know about the Jews: we can verify that they do believe in their miraculous history. You are speaking one. (True, the first person who wrote the Torah may not have believed it, but that isn’t relevant to the Kuzari’s proof. The sole issue is the fact that people, a nation, actually believes that story. Regarding the Aztecs we simply can’t know for sure).
Furthermore, the only sources we have for this myth - written in the sixteenth century - (which was after the Aztec’s were already defeated) all contradict each other. Id. Why is that important? Because it means that we can’t say that the Aztec’s neccesarily believed that there were “white raisins” when the other myths don’t (neccesarily) mention the raisins. It one person writing HIS version of the events. The Aztecs are no longer around to ask them. Had they survived, we would have been able to ask them, specifically, whether they believed in the miraculous details of the myth, and we could have thereby put the Kuzari principle under some pressure.
Furthermore, I simply fail to decipher the commemorative aspect of the Aztec myth. Aside from a city - and who doesn’t have cities? - I fail to see how a city commemorates the white raisins.
This is evidence that one Jew believes in this story today, and that’s all it is. It does not prove anyone believed the exodus story was literally true at the time it was first written down (centuries after the events are supposed to have happened.)
Well, except for the ones who don’t.
They’re not *real *Jews.
They’re Scotsmen?
Yes. You can tell from the sporrans.
So if he stops responding to you, you will go away?
Or if the rest of us keep responding to abele derer, will he learn something?
Can somebody explain to me how we got the figure of 2.000.000 Jews in the exodus?
I’m an apathist, so I don’t know dick about the bible, but if there were 2 million Jews 2600+ years ago, wouldn’t there be a lot more now? I mean, the bible states that the decendants of 2 people grew to at least 2 million in 4000 years (while god was pissed at them for eating fruit), so from 2 million to 200 million should be doable in 2000 years, right? especially since this time god was on their side
I thought I’d make one last comment before because you said you weren’t going to comment anymore…but here you are! You’re Dovid aren’t you, you’re pretending to be more than one person again. But if so, you said in another correspondence with me you weren’t pretending to be more than person; were you lying? (For the rest of y’all, Dovid is a haredi rabbi who goes around to Modern Orthodox and atheist blogs trying to make the case for haredi Judaism and anti-evolutionism. He wrote an article all about how Jews should believe in young earth creationism. I think he found this thread through a link I made at my blog. He used to troll me and has started reading my blog again, so please excuse me if I’m wrong abele, but it seems he might be starting up his old habits. Your logical methodology, your taking a break on Sunday, saying you won’t comment anymore and then changing your mind almost immediately, and your ALL CAPS seem very similar to his writing style).
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I don’t remember where I saw it, like I said, it’s a guesstimate. The point is they were a military power and there were thousands.
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Like I said, they recorded it as history.
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The “on the way” miracles, which qualify like the manna miracles, are the color-changes and the stream coming from the tree. The last of the series of the miracles is the opal miracle, which is commemorated by the building of a city.
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So you need somewhere in the neighborhood of millions. Seems like the first three points are superfluous then. We disagree on this point. I think thousands should qualify as a sufficiently large number and you don’t. As long as we disagree on this point, we’re at a standstill. Oh well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree, you’ll be a theist and I’ll be an atheist. eilu vi-eilu divrei Elohim Chayim (These and those are the ways of the living God).
Anyways, I actually liked wintertime’s bringing up of Constantine’s army. According to you, must be they were all hallucinating. I find it more likely the whole thing was made up later.
Or was a major exaggeration