It’s Arabic. It comes from the 11th century Kitab al-Kuzari (book of the Khazars), which was Judah Halevi’s collection of arguments for Judaism, as put in the mouth of the Rabbi who converted the Khazars. You can read the entire thing here:
Here’s the actual argument, if you’re curious:
I’m just curious, what’s your position on the miracle of the sun?
Legitimate miracle or not?
How about the idea that Kim Sun il can control the weather?
Um…Didn’t the german people gobble up a bucket load of false history with regard to the Jews being subhuman and also their ‘Aryan superiority’?
Shoot, wasn’t the Soviet Union known for fabricating history?
What about the Mormons? Joseph Smith made some fantastic claims and his followers gobbled it up.
Hallucination. People hallucinate when looking at the sun. Happens all the time.
What makes Kuzari compelling to many people is the duration of the event. Manna fed 2.5 million people for 14,600 days.
Now, the response is that national history evolved.
(1) Can you retype that here or point to the specific post? It was a multi-page disaster. Does it specifically deal with the parts of scripture that go against the “proof”?
(2) Would you say that a majority of Jews agree with the “proof”? If not, does that undercut your argument? How much of a minority of Jews would it take for the “proof” to no longer be valid?
(3) Following up on (2), is it your position that historical facts change depending on how many people believe it? The more people believe in the truth of something, the truer it becomes? If I can start a movement where people believe that, say, George Washington was 37 feet tall and a majority of Americans come to believe that, does it make it so?
Thank you for your consideration in addressing these specific points one by one. If you’re too busy today, rather than respond with “I’m too busy to answer the questions here, but I have time to spew out some other irrelevant points”, I’d prefer you wait until you have the time to address these and other questions in this thread.
Answer your questions yourself. I am not going to deal with you elementary questions.
You asked for examples of nations believing in false history; there they are. Now of course you don’t want to address the issue.
I’m not an expert in world mythology, but it seems to me that to satisfy your request, we need to find an ancient legend that’s accepted by a culture of people and transmitted orally, at a time when writing came along, or more modern people came who could document them. That’s the key for the Exodus story - it was a campfire story told about the glory of past days, when papyrus or paper was invented and things like that started to get written down instead of just passed along orally.
Surely we can find tribes in the more primitive parts of the world where the people had beliefs of great things that happened to their ancestors. I would think that just about every primitive tribe would have something like that. All you world mythology experts, help?
Hmmm, I thought a debate was a two-way affair. The questions in that post are legitimate counter-examples of your “proof”. If you don’t plan on addressing these questions, why should we address your theory?
Um, okay then.
Sinai was the result of a similar thing. Fair enough.
/thread over ?
If US history was passed on by oral tradition for a few hundred years, I imagine it would look something like this.
On the 4th Thursday in November in 1942, captain Columbus and the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth colony in the Mayflower. They were greeted by Geronimo and the Indians who presented them with a feast of Turkey, Pumpkin Pie, and sweet potato casserole with mini-marshmallows. This was when George Washington the leader of the Pilgrims fell in love with Geronimo’s daughter. Their marraige sealed the peace between the white man and the Indians.
Then on the third Monday in January of 1865, the blacks arrived from Africa in thee ships the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, escaping slavery. They were led by their King, Martin Luther, and their general, another black man named Abraham Lincoln.
We know this to be true because our fathers and their fathers tell us this story all the way back to when they arrived with Columbus on the Mayflower or the his highness Martin Luther, and we still commemorate these events on Thanksgiving and King Martin Luther day.
Isn’t there a tribe in Africa that believes that their ancestors came from the Dogone star?
This is a fuzzy memory and may have come from a UFO related cite…I don’t even know if the ‘Dogone’ star is accurate.
Mokèlé-mbèmbé, maybe? The tribes of the Congo River basin swear up and down that something resembling a 30-foot rhino or sauropod lives in Lake Télé, but literally dozens of expeditions have turned up nothing.
Just give it a few hundred years and it will be TRUTH!
I don’t know if this has been brought up, but I think it’s an interesting point:
There have been dozens offered, but he’s dismissed each on technicalities, usually claiming the number of people involved was too low. It seems like a reasonable request, but it’s really just a distraction. When really pressed, he’ll trot out something like this: in post 606 in the Pascal’s wager thread.
Honestly, he’s done a great deal of damage to his own argument. If there are no, or very few, other events that fit the requirements that Kuzari sets out, then it’s completely and utterly useless to determine anything. If there are many, then not only is the bible literally true, but so are a lot of other myths, many of which directly contradict the concept of a single, true god, much less any kind of objective reality.
It’s rationalizations piled on top of rationalizations.
Heh, in fairness I don’t even know if what I presented was accurate - it’s a foggy memory of mine…
However, a proof can both suck and blow. Case in point: The Kuzari Proof!
(The quote above isn’t Meatros’ quote, but I’m not sure how to properly reference his post. Anyway…)