Kuzari: Round Two

Great Debates
161

The central theme of your response is that I am employing special pleading. Why? I am presenting an event that was believed to have happened to two million people – quite a large nation – and all you can present is an event which doesn’t even mention the number of people. Your myths may have been believed to have happened to only, for example, a thousand people. Is it special pleading when I claim that if you can only present a story which only had a hundreth of the number of witnesses as special pleading? When all you guys present is infinitesmal compared to the Old Testament’s history, and you still claim that I am engaging in special pleading – then in fact it is you who are engaged in special pleading. It is you who claim that we should, for some odd reason, assume that God would never involve Himself in human affairs, that we should ignore any evidence for His miracles.

Now, if I would demand that your myths contain 613 commemorative commandment, and if you only present 612 you lose – that would be special pleading. But I never asked for anything like Sinia. I asked for something even remotely similar. True, there are alot of gray areas. Would 100,000 people observing 5 commemorations be sufficient? I don’t know. But merely because there are gray areas does not entitle you to claim that any myth that was ever believed is sufficient to disprove Kuzari. Find me one UNFORGETTABLE national event, and you will be in business. Until then, you got nothing.

Second, I agree with you Noel. I never claimed that my evidence is conclusive. All I am saying is that it is a strong form of evidence - since it has never been shown to be wrong. How can you possibly be sure that people will gobble up a false history like that.

Third, Tom, people will not accept false histories when it imposes upon them arduous commandments. Am I sure? No. But why are you sure? Why are you sure that people will accept false histories? I am presenting evidence. You are claiming that my evidence is fallible, because, you claim, people will accept false-histories. I don’t know where you got that idea from.

Fourth, Tom, even the most-dogmatic (that means dogmatically skeptical) bible critics agree that the “earlier” books of the Bible – such as Amos and Hosea – were written circa 800 BC. Those books mention the Exodus and the forty-year stay in the desert.

Fifth, Bible criticism is bunk in the first place. I have yet to read one good reason for the critics’ assumption that Moses didn’t write the Five books of Moses.

Noel, that’ special pleading when you throw at me those children-stories. Show me the details. Show me that what you got is a national, extremely-heavily commemorated event.

162

There was no nation at the time the event was said to have happened. There was never, factually in this universe two million people who witnessed the exodus. Never. End of line. Your “argument” falls apart at this step.

Again, ignorant bronze-age men came up with a myth. They said they had grand origins. The other ignorant bronze-age men believed it because people are perfectly willing to believe stupid things to support religion.

As an example of the above, you, an educated 21st century person, believe a myth is true because you want the religion to be true. And to convince yourself that your religion is factually true you jumble together a nonsensical tangle of wishful thinking and cloudy reasoning. You are the perfect example of how a huge belief can worm its way into people.

163

And yet you have no external evidence that the “two million people” ever existed.
Your numbers game is special pleading. Period.

I have never made any such claim about God. Now you are either conflating claims from other people with my observations or you are just making stuff up. You do not have evidence for his miracles. You have a single set of writings told by multiple people with almost no provenance on which you wish to hang your belief. Feel free to do so, but at least have the honesty to recognize that your beliefs are not evidence.

I am content with nothing–you, on the other hand, are desparate to believe something when you also have nothing.
You have stories. Period. You have no evidence regarding when the stories were written. You have no physical evidence for the events narrated in the stories.
You manufacture a scenario that requires most of the stories to be carried down in oral tradition for hundreds of years without any evidence that any other oral tradition has survived for an equal length of time, without modification or enhancement, and then add claims for “numbers” that are not supported by any external evidence. That is special pleading.

It is pretty much what people do, even today, and was pretty much the way that all history was transmitted in the period for which you claim.

The very fact that the only history that you will accept is the one you choose to believe is the evidence. People “believed” that all the kingdoms of Greece united to lay siege to Ilium/Troy for ten years. People “believed” that Romulus founded Rome after his ancestors escaped Ilium and he was suckled by a she wolf after being exposed to die. People “believed” that Arthur led a united England with virtuous knights for many years. People still “believe” that the U.S. won its independence from Britain by shooting at lines of eighteenth cenutury armies from behind trees and fences.
All of these stories probably have some kernel of fact at their cores, but that hardly means that they are true in the ways that they were finally recorded.

800 is still a very long time from the time in which the events were purported to have taken place. The references in Amos are pretty sketchy and it it interesting that while Amos and Hosea mention a flight from Egypt and Amos mentions 40 years in the wilderness, neither of them mention Passover or Moses. In addition, there is only a single reference to Moses (Jeremiah 15) and not one reference to Sinai or Horeb, in the prophets that were written prior to the Babylonian exile. For such a momentous event, it certainly does not seem to have been recorded many places before the return from Babylon.

I doubt that you have read much and your assertion simply indicates that you have no informed opinion. It might interest you to know, (since, based on your other comments, you are unaware), that biblical criticism arose among believers who were simply trying to understand the inconsistencies that appear in the books. There is no “assumption” that Moses was not the author. There is a final verdict, based on years of analysis and study, that the Torah was written by multiple authors over many years, (and that some of the written accounts from the Torah are continued by the same authors, but separated by later editors into the books of Joshua and Judges). You might choose to believe that Moses was such an incompetent writer that he had to put two separate stories with conflicting accounts of Creation and the Flood into his works or that when he recorded God’s commandments, he quotes God differently each time, but I give the guy more credit than that.

164

You have posted over 150 times on this board…and this one statement of yours allows me to dismiss without question everything you have written before.

165

Are you doubting that someone could write about their own death?

Just how skeptical are you Czarcasm!??!

166

If serious scholars actually think that he wrote all five books, then why isn’t everything written from his death onward proclaimed to be the most accurate prophecy in the history of, well…history?

167

“He wouldn’t write ‘Arrrrggghh,’ he’d just say it.”

“Maybe he was dictating.”

168

Obama is a Muslim.

169

A war started by a pack of traitors who wanted to preserve the slave system “evolved” into a romantic Lost Cause in the name of freedom from centralized tyranny.

Game. Set. Match.

170

Do you know anything about history? People have endured hardships up to and including miserable prolonged death in the name of nonsensical histories of the Divinely Ordained King or the Master Race or the Worker’s Paradise etc ad nauseam.

171

Obviously it’s because of those durn liberal universities foisting their atheism onto serious scholars…

:stuck_out_tongue:

172

A war in the name of freedom from centralized tyranny “evolved” into a lost cause of a pack of traitors and slavers.

Match. Set. Game.

173

It doesn’t matter which one is true, because one has to be the “false history” that our OP decries as non-existent.