About 80% of the population of India would disagree.
You’re welcome.
Have you considered designating someone to post “But that’s not a nationally commemorated event” everytime one of your points gets rebutted? It would let your side of the debate continue in your absence without any substantial change.
Maybe we can set up a macro.
I’m trying to think of some other examples here. I think the current consensus is that King Arthur was based on a real person. John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman was a real person. Robin Hood probably fictional. And of course, there’s St. Nicholas. I realize the life of a person isn’t necessary an event, although a person would become the basis for a myth the same way an event does. And I’m ready to laugh heartily if abele derer tells me St. Nicholas is not commemorated.
I was under the vague impression that his entire argument consists of “God did it. Duh.”
The whole Kuzari principal is based on the assumption that an individual could not have came later in history, and “reminded” people about the whole Sinai and 10 plagues story. Certainly people would have asked why their parents have no knowledge of this! This however, is only an assumption, which I will prove to be wrong. The Mormons believe the third book of Nephi to be true, I will quote some here, but feel free to check it yourself. 3 Nephi chap. 9
1And it came to pass that there was a avoice heard among all the inhabitants of the earth, upon all the face of this land, crying:
2Wo, wo, wo unto this people; wo unto the inhabitants of the whole earth except they shall arepent; for the devil blaugheth, and his angels rejoice, because of the slain of the fair sons and daughters of my people; and it is because of their iniquity and abominations that they are fallen!
3Behold, that great city Zarahemla have I aburned with fire, and the inhabitants thereof.
4And behold, that great city Moroni have I caused to be asunk in the depths of the sea, and the inhabitants thereof to be drowned.
5And behold, that great city aMoronihah have I covered with earth, and the inhabitants thereof, to hide their iniquities and their abominations from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints shall not come any more unto me against them.
3 Nephi chap 10
1And now behold, it came to pass that all the people of the land did ahear these sayings, and did witness of it. And after these sayings there was silence in the land for the space of many hours;
2For so great was the astonishment of the people that they did cease lamenting and howling for the loss of their kindred which had been slain; therefore there was silence in all the land for the space of many hours.
3And it came to pass that there came a voice again unto the people, and all the people did hear, and did witness of it, saying:
4O ye people of these agreat cities which have fallen, who are descendants of Jacob, yea, who are of the house of Israel, how oft have I bgathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and have cnourished you.
3 Nephi chap. 11
8And it came to pass, as they understood they cast their eyes up again towards heaven; and behold, they asaw a Man bdescending out of heaven; and he was clothed in a white robe; and he came down and stood in the midst of them; and the eyes of the whole multitude were turned upon him, and they durst not open their mouths, even one to another, and wist not what it meant, for they thought it was an angel that had appeared unto them.
9And it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand and spake unto the people, saying:
10Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world.
11And behold, I am the alight and the life of the world; and I have drunk out of that bitter bcup which the Father hath given me, and have glorified the Father in ctaking upon me the sins of the world, in the which I have suffered the dwill of the Father in all things from the beginning.
12And it came to pass that when Jesus had spoken these words the whole multitude afell to the earth; for they remembered that it had been bprophesied among them that Christ should cshow himself unto them after his ascension into heaven.
The Kuzari principal would tell me, that these stories must be true, because the people would not accept an individual’s story about their ancestor’s, if their parents did not know of it! But not only could they only ask their ancestors, they could have asked anyone in the world. Now I certainly don’t believe the Mormons books, but when you base a theory, on the extent of people’s tendency to believe to an absurd extent, you are producing a very weak theory indeed. There is one other problem with the Kuzari Argument: for it to be valid, there must be an unbroken chain of tradition starting from the population witnessing the miracles described in the Torah. However, some text in the Old Testament suggests otherwise. According to the book of Judges, And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died, being an hundred and ten years old. And they buried him in the border of his inheritance in Timnathheres, in the mount of Ephraim, on the north side of the hill Gaash. And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers:and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim: And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed themselves unto them, and provoked the LORD to anger. (Judges 2:8-12)
Furthermore, in 2 Kings “the book of the law” is discovered, serving as a reminder of previously forgotten traditions.
And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD … And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes. And the king commanded Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Achbor the son of Michaiah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asahiah a servant of the king’s, saying, Go ye, enquire of the LORD for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found: for great is the wrath of the LORD that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us. (2 Kings 22:8-13)
These excerpts seem to raise doubt upon any claim that the oral tradition of the miracles in the Torah were maintained continuously by more than a minority of the population. Therefore, it would seem that the population inevitably accepted a history presented to them (whether true or false) by a small group of people. If taken at face value, this on it’s own is enough to invalidate the whole argument.
And an event that should have been remembered forever, and was forgotten, is the world wide flood. Surely Noah and his three sons explained to their children why they were the only humans alive, and that god now gave them the seven laws. No one should have ever doubted, who is god, their parents, going way back to Noah, would have a story no one would doubt. Accordingly, the world wide flood must have never happened, because something like this would never be forgotten.
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Regarding the Mormon tradition, is this a nation-changing event? In other words, were there everlasting commemorations of this event? Were the people who saw this event commanded to teach this event to their descendants? Finally, these events happened to the people “on the face of this land.” The entire American civilization, according to the Book of Mormon, were killed out. Therefore, how were the people supposed to contradict this event?
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The citation of the Book of Judges is not relevant. First, not the entire generation who saw the miracles died out. For example, Pinhas is still alive in Judges 20:28. Second, the tradition was not lost. For example, in Judges 6:13, the populace ask Gideon “where are the miracles that our ancestors told us?”. Apparently, the tradition was never broken. The fact that they did not “know” about the miracles in the verse you cited merely means that they didn’t have first-hand knowledge.
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Regarding your citation from the Book of Kings, there are seven flaws:
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Nowhere do the verses imply that the miraculous history was forgotten; it merely says that the Torah was forgotten (for example the national miracles if manna and the splitting of the Red Sea were recorded in Joshua as well).
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The text does not imply that the Torah was forgotten by the entire population. It was merely forgotten by King Josiah (indeed, Hilkiah said, “Look, I found a Torah scroll”).
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The text does not imply that King Josiah forgot that a Torah was given to Israel; rather that he was merely unaware of its content;
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Even if the Torah was forgotten, it was only because it was burned and eradicated by Menashe (Menashe’s father was Hezekiah who was Torah-observant) – Josiah’s grandfather. If so, once the Torah was found there were still many people who were from the days of King Hezekiah, so the chain was never broken. King Josiah could have quickly asked the elderly people: “Is this the same Torah from the days of King Hezekiah?”
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The same book of Kings (and Chronicles) that your are relying on says that King David, Solomon, Joshafat, and Hezekiah all had Torah scrolls. These people all lived way before King Joshiah. So if you accept the Book of Kings, you have to accept that those great Kings also had the Torah.
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The Samaritans broke off from Judaism about 150 years before the days of King Josiah (II Kings 17). It is unlikely that they would have accepted the burdensome Torah from the Jews subsequent to that split. Not surprisingly, they share the same Torah that we do. If so, the same Torah we have today MUST have been written way before the days of King Josiah.
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The Book of Psalms, which has King David’s name at the start of 73 of the Psalms, records ALL OF THE MIRACLES mentioned in the Torah and the fact that “the Torah was given to Israel” and many other praises to the Torah.
You persist in the same, fallacious, cicular logic of trying to cite the Bible as evdince for its own claims, and still don’;t seem to have grasped the fact that you can’t prove any Sinai story existed before (at the earliest) the 8th Century BCE. You keep inventing a bunch of arbitrary, self-serving and meaningless criteria. “Nation changing event?” What does that mean?
Your whole case boils down to circular logic and special pleading.
Why do I have to prove that the Bible was written before the 8th Century BCE? All I am saying is that national, unforgettable events are have never been shown to be false.
Why? Because people aren’t that gullible. So we have two ways to explain how this belief got off the ground: 1) The events happened; 2) The events didn’t happen, and people will believe a false national, unforgettable event. Option two hasn’t happened anywhere else, so I don’t know why you would think that it happened here.
Why do you claim that my criteria are arbitrary? You do agree, I am sure, that if God performs forty years of miracles and then commands that the event be commemorated forever, would change the face of the nation for a considerable amount of time. Show me something even remotely similar.
So, one guy said that George Washington’s cherry tree is “the best example” of a false national, nation-changing event. Should I even respond to that?
Any chance you’ll address the fact that your assertion is circular and demonstrably irrational?
A legend of an event isn’t evidence of it. The legend itself isn’t evidence that the legend has been continuously commemorated. Current commemoration isn’t evidence that something has been commemorated since the time of the legend.
What most likely happened is some ancient dude made up a grand story about heroic origins several hundred years before his time. It was accepted. It became a tradition. And today some people think it’s true.
Honestly, it really seems like your problem is that you don’t understand how to differentiate fact from opinion and reality from stories.
You say people aren’t that gullible. But you are being gullible by blindly and without any critical thinking whatsoever accepting this childishly feeble argument. Is your faith is so weak that you need to feel it has rational basis behind it? Instead of making up a rational basis, this should be a sign that you need to abandon the faith.
Join us on the atheist bus. It’s cozy. And you don’t have to argue nonsense.
1/ never underestimate the gullibility of people.
two/ doesn’t your story fail your own definition? the people aren’t a nation at the moment of the miracle; so it’s not a national event…
So now you are contending you don’t remember your own argument?
You don’t. You just ahve to prove that the Sinai story existed in any form at all - oral or written - before the 8th Century BCE. If you can’t prove that any kind of continuous tradition extends back to the alleged time of the Exodus (which would be either the 13th or 16th Century BCE, depending on which OT dating you use), then the basis for your entire case falls apart.
And that’s aside from all the archaeological evidence contradicting the Exodus narrative.
I simply don’t see why I would have to prove that the belief existed before 800 BC. All I am saying is that the belief existed at some point. The question is: can a belief about a national event be believed by the nation if that event never happened. You claim that it can. That people are gullible enough to believe a false national event. Why? Has it ever happened anywhere else?
In short, what intrigues me is how this belief got off the ground.
What amazes me is that you have trouble with this.
People believe stupid things now. As I said upthread, modern, educated 20th century Americans joined the Branch Davidians and gave their children up to be raped by David Koresh. They did this willingly and without any evidence.
Same thing with Scientology. Same thing with the Moonies. Same thing with Islam, same thing with Christianity and same thing with Judaism.
People believe stupid shit because they don’t question religion. This happens all the time and you not knowing that is amazing.
Yes, people believe things based on little evidence. For example, and this is true, a close friend of mine believes that a certain book was written by an angel – simply because the book is too complex, according to him, to have been written by a human being (bais yosef is the name of the book). That’s called believing in something based on a shockingly small amount of evidence. Scientologists, moonies, and many other people also believe something based on a tiny amount of evidence.
What we have here – kuzari – is very different. Here, we have people believing in something that, had it been false, there would have been a mountain of evidence against it. So, for example, let’s imagine Ezra comes along and says “millions of your ancestors, 500 years ago, were commanded by God to observe an everlasting Sabbath, and were commanded to ‘never forget about the miracles of the Exodus,’ and where commanded to ‘teach your children about the miracles.’” If this was false, and people still believed it, that would mean that they are believing something that there is a mountain of evidence against it – the fact that none of them heard about these miracles from their millions of ancestors who supposedly saw the miracles.
Now, you claim, “well, the stories evolved over time.” My response: how do you know that national events can evolve over time? Has it ever happened anywhere else?
Millions of Americans believe that the War for Independence was won by canny backwoodsmen firing long rifles at stuffy Brits and Hessians who insisted on forming up in straight lines and firing muskets on command. This is simply not true, yet it is accepted by millions after fewer than 250 years.
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You have resolutley failed to respond to the fact that the Lakota have strong traditions that they were created in what are now South and North Dakota despite a significant amount of evidence that they actually migrated to that region from places farther East.
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You insist that if a new mythology was introduced to a people, they would “recognize” that it was false because they had no prior tradition of its occurrence, yet this fails on the obvious point that if it was presented as a “discovered” truth, there would be no reason to expect that it had been known by one’s immediate ancestors.
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Regarding point Number 1, about Americans’ opinions about the War of Independence, I don’t know where you got your figure about “millions of american believe.” Many (maybe most) americans, in fact, will tell you that they aren’t really sure what happened during War of Independence, other than the fact that it was a war against the brits. Indeed, the War of independence isn’t on most americans minds.
My point is that, of course, people aren’t aware of every single historical event. However, they will never come to believe a false-national event. -
Regarding your point about the Lakota indians, you fail to specify the number of people who were believed to have been formed in the Dakotas, (or the number of people who are believed to have migrated from the east, which eventually formed the Lakota tribes). If you can’t provide a number, then I have trouble seeing the relevance. Furthermore, was their belief about their ancestors a nation-chaning, unforgettable event? It was not. The miracles of the Exodus have approximately 35 daily commemorations – how many commemorations do the Lakota have, commemorations which were believed to have been established at the time of the event they believe in?
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Finally, you claim that a claim of a “discovered” national history wouldn’t invoke skepticism from the Israelites. I disagree. They could have easily asked, "If what you claim you discovered is true, then why didn’t we discover it – or hear about it – from our quite-recent ancestors?
Now, you may be right. It might be that some really-charismatic figure can pull this one off. I don’t know. I don’t have a position. I wonder why you do. Why are you sure that national history, national history of this magnitude can be foisted on a nation without anything even remotely similar to what the ancient Israelites believed happened to their ancestors. Are you open to evidence? Or not?
You are just hand waving to make your belief special.
You are just hand waving to make your belief special.
This is silly. If someone pulled out what he claimed to have been an ancient book that described events about which no one had any memory, then why would they doubt him? You are inventing things for people to believe and reactions of people to declarations when you have absolutely no idea how any of them would have actually reacted.
Your speculation about the common reaction has no basis. If someone showed up claiming a new history that made the local population feel good about themselves and made the claim that it all happened 500 (or 800) years ago, on what basis would anyone try to challenge the story? The whole point of “discovering” the story was that it was lost. Given the period when many scholars think that the book of Exodus was written–during or just after the Babylonian Captivity–there would have been plenty of reason for the people, having just suffered a major disruption to their lives and society, to accept the new story and that very disruption could have provided the explanation for the lack of “memory.”
Why would anyone have a story or memory of what happened 500 or 800 years previously? How many people do you know who have a reliable, (or even fuzzy), “memory” of what their extended family was experiencing in 1511 or 1211? (People who read histories don’t count, since your whole point rests on some sort of oral tradition.)
Nineteenth century ethnologists invented all sorts of claims for the ancestors of Europeans that were accepted as real by millions of Europeans and North Americans. (Those beliefs became so entrenched that the Nazis were able to employ them as a basis for re-creating German society on their foundation and the French, English, and Italians had a number of similar beliefs although the tales did not lead as far in shaping then-current society.) You want to hand-wave away the beliefs of people in the U.S. regarding the War for Independence, but the myth I described is very much a widely held belief among all sorts of people.
As it happens, I am actually a bit sympathetic to the general notion that you put forth. I think that the stories of an Egyptian captivity and escape and a period of nomadic existence in the Sinai might very well point to some sort of event (or multiple separate events) for some small number of people (or several different groups) in the Levant–separate events around which a much bigger story could have been built incorporating elements from each of the different traditions. However, the very fact that the story in its current form appears to have been written contemporaneously with the Babylonian event also strongly suggests that it could have been written as a popular exhortation based on a claim that “we already went through something like this,” (with the current disruption of families and records providing the necessary cover for the apparent lack of memory of the “earlier” event).
Unfortunately, you take that sort of premise and run out to extreme ends, deperate to believe that it had to be true, (despite a serious failure to find any supporting archaeological evidence), then you manufacture an odd set of conditions that only your group could possibly fulfill and declare that the “evidence” is clear in your manufactured story.
only to you. The rest of us can see that you are special pleading and hand waving. You take it as fact that the Kuzari is different and then make great pains to dismiss all the similar events.
Here are some Rainbow Serpent style stories that are typical of those attributed to the Dream time, and said to be tens of thousands of years old. They are utterly lovely stories, and some of this ilk have a degree of intellectual sophistication beyond merely Just So stories, although I am not going to bother hunting them all up.
They were widely believed until white settlement of Australia.
How did they come into existence, and continue to be transmitted from age to age, unless they are true?
Perhaps because they served other purposes than literal truth - they contributed to group cohesion, and conveyed meta- “truths” beyond the literal, in the way novels do now.
The problem with the Kuzari argument is that it assumes that notions of evidence and truth are absolute.
In reality, evidence is not conclusive. It has weight, and has to be weighed against other evidence. If I see a man and an woman in the street holding hands, that is evidence that they are in an affectionate relationship. But it is not conclusive. They might be actors in a street scene being filmed by an unseen long-lens camera. And the fact that they are holding hands suggests, but is certainly not conclusive evidence of, the proposition that they are lovers. They might be brother and sister.
The argument from historical belief has weight. We believe the US Constitution was signed even though there is now no firsthand testimony of its signing. That is partly due to the folk-memory of such a thing, because many people have not seen the original or the supporting contemporaneous documents. But there is no sensible doubt that they exist, and that they attest to such a thing occurring, and that their collective forgery is grossly improbable.
Thus the folk memory of the signing of the US Constitution has very substantial weight, because it is supported by other things.
But the literal truth of dreamtime myths? Not so much. Kuzari? Same thing.
Such weight as there is attaching to bare folk memory does not displace the weight of the serious prospect of error in transmission, as evidenced by any number of social accounts that cannot be veridical.