Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.
Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.
You’re right, that the supernatural parts did not happen like a katabasis story.
But you are 100% wrong that 100% didn’t happen.
There are serious issues with the work, chief among them being Homer combining the 14th century Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia with the 12th century sea peoples retaking of Wilusa from the Hittites. But many, many of the fragmentary details being combined into a mythological history did in fact occur, including Odysseus’s one day battle with Egypt (Merneptah’s Libyan/sea peoples war).
I’m not denying that some religious myth-books do, in fact, contain references to historical events, what I’m saying is that they’re not to be relied upon as they’re often inaccurate to the point of being apocryphal.
Example: Hebrew slaves did not, in fact, build the pyramids.
Then we are in agreement. Because what you were saying is that the works were 100% false, meaning that nothing mentioned in them had any historical basis or correlation. Which is factually incorrect.
I agree that they cannot be relied upon in absence of many, many other sources both primary and archeological to discern what’s bullshit from what was a kernel of truth.
But the idea that mythological histories don’t contain any kernels of truth at all is not a position that’s held up well over time, such as the consensus being Troy didn’t exist until some nerds followed the geography in Homer exactly and found the damn thing.
So while you are correct that Hebrew slaves didn’t build the pyramids, there are records that groups of twelve tribes were brought into captivity into Egypt not long before there was a large battle with Egypt where some of those tribes were recorded as fully circumcised (as opposed to the partial circumcision of the time). Tribes who later ally together to conquer their homelands unlike the anachronistic book of Joshua’s conquering. Their later non-Biblical mythologized history even talks about how their prophet died in the desert as they were wandering back by foot from a battle in North Africa, and while there’s zero evidence of the Israelites mentioning Moses until much later on, there’s two separate 8th century BCE inscriptions of one of these tribes of people claiming someone by the same name as the prophet who died in the desert as the ancestor of their rulers. These last people were the Denyen, part of the sea peoples, which included the tribes brought into Egyptian captivity and who were fighting Egypt while circumcised.
Sometimes history gets appropriated and changed, and it’s important to keep an eye out for things like that. So when the Bible has a story about how the ancestors of one group of people have their birthright stolen by the ancestor named ‘Israel’, even if those mythological eponymous founders didn’t actually exist or trick their father with soup, a story of stealing one people’s history and making it Israel’s shouldn’t just be ignored, particularly in light of emerging evidence of Israel in its infancy having had trade relations and cultural exchange with the area those people were in before major religious reforms and rewriting of history.
You can play games and write dozens of paragraphs of mental gymnastics and equivocation, but, at the end of the day, religious texts are fiction. They’re wholly-invented myths and legends, and that they may, sometimes, include references (no matter how inaccurate and/or embellished) to verified historical events, that does not - in any way - go to validate the myths, legends, nor even the (at beast) quasi-historical references which may be contained in the myth books and scrolls/tablets of multitudinous religions.
If you have a specific event or historical figure you wish to make claims as real - as told/described in some religious text and with specific relevance to such (“Persian Emperor Xerxes existed!” will not suffice. Prove, for example, Jesus was a real, magical person, son of God (whom you also must prove exists) who exists without citing the Bible or any other religious text, and we’ll have a conversation) - then please provide corroborating evidence from a reliable source.
Also, ya know, I wanna see all the proof, teh science/physics, etc on how you proved both God and Jesus are both real and Jesus died and resurrected 3 days later. The water and wine business, healing of the sick, the fiches and loaves….
Prove it. With evidence.
But I don’t believe that Jesus resurrected or turned water to wine or healed the sick or fed people magic food? Why would I try to prove something I’m pretty certain didn’t happen? I’m confused about what we’re arguing about at this point.
Or have you spent this whole time thinking that I’m a Christian? Like even though the parts where I was saying “yeah, obviously that supernatural stuff is bullshit”?
I’m a lifelong Agnostic who if pressed would argue that we’re in a simulation. I just think studying the Bible academically is really fun and spent years contributing to /r/AcademicBiblical discussing the topic with PhDs in the subject.
You’re going to have to look elsewhere if you want someone proving the Christian mythos to you.
You were arguing that religious myth books were accounts of historical fact, so go on and prove it.
All of your blathering is meaningless without links to evidence from reliable, established sources.
Fixed your strawman for you.
You mean like the four links I already provided indicating that there were traces of historical fact in the Bible?
If you just want to argue around a strawman binaryism if your own projected claim that the Bible is inerrant, have fun, but I’ve got better things to do.
Fwiw, I appreciate what you tried to do. I enjoy reading about the facts that people manage to separate from the fiction. Religion shouldn’t be a thing, but even if all people stopped believing in it, the texts shouldn’t be destroyed like some people would want. I find that silly… hating something so much… it’s energy better spent elsewhere
Honestly if people stopped believing in it the academic study would shrink but improve so much.
A lot of the field is kind of crap and deserving of skepticism, with too little effort to correct for anchoring and survivorship biases.
But yes, sometimes I can find that discussing the academic study of the Bible is as obtuse with some atheists as with evangelicals.
I don’t take it personally though. It’s not a dead religion and a lot of people have trauma relationships with the subject because of things the live remnants of the traditions do. I was fortunate enough not to be born into it and to have spent most of my childhood not even knowing who the heck ‘Jesus’ was supposed to be. It was a huge advantage personally and a huge advantage in seeing past the bullshit when I got around to reading the material.
Not everyone was so fortunate, so I generally have empathy for those who take that more close minded approach even if I do my best to provide the objective information relevant to the conversation.
Appreciate your comment though!
No. Just like when an episode of Star Trek mentions WWII, it doesn’t magically make Star Trek real, lmao