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Reason for Religion I Find Difficult to Refute..?
There's a line of reasoning being promoted by Orthodox Jews.... can it be true?
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 Reason for Religion I Find Difficult to Refute..? | |
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mayor of simpleton
CAT v. DOGMA  Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Feb 20, 2009 Location: Vienna, Austria Total Topics: 37 Total Posts: 1548
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 #11
baden511 wrote: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. How is it possible that this quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle received a minus point in being helpful for this thread? I guess no one can expect the "Spanish Inquisition"! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gldlyTjXk9A Meow! GREG I am not one to attribute that which I cannot understand immediately to be god(s)-perhaps I will never understand, but god(s) are not defined by my lack of understanding-this is the foundation of dogmas, the pressing of connotative values into the realm of dennotative meaning. - MOS THE JOKE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTo6kSZlPI Atheism is the invention of the theist to place non-believers into context with their belief. - MOS Where facts are few, faith abounds. - MOS Atheism is a unique "-ism": followers are not bound by a shared form of belief in, but rather a shared form of disbelief in. - MOS |
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TempletonEsquire
Irrationally Biased Usergroup: Members Joined: Mar 05, 2009 Location: Close To Nil Total Topics: 9 Total Posts: 327 |
#12
History is written by the victors. There is no way to prove knowledge by word of mouth, communication in any form should be subject to empirical determinism. It is just as easy to believe that the old norse god Odin existed and talked to both the Ashkenazi Jews and the Vikings, who both through lineage inherited Odinaic values such as the very language we type in. The idea that there is any race of humanity that is somehow not diluted and corrupted by everyone else's race is just fallacious; we're all from africa, we all descend from the same proto parents. Genetic religious values tend to get lost between people humping each other veraciously. Edited by TempletonEsquire on Nov 20, 2009 - 2:46 PM |
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mayor of simpleton
CAT v. DOGMA Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Feb 20, 2009 Location: Vienna, Austria Total Topics: 37 Total Posts: 1548
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#13
TempletonEsquire wrote: History is written by the victors. AMEN!  Whoever wins the war, god always side up with them. He just changes his costume and his nickname.  Meow! (damn it!) GREG I am not one to attribute that which I cannot understand immediately to be god(s)-perhaps I will never understand, but god(s) are not defined by my lack of understanding-this is the foundation of dogmas, the pressing of connotative values into the realm of dennotative meaning. - MOS THE JOKE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTo6kSZlPI Atheism is the invention of the theist to place non-believers into context with their belief. - MOS Where facts are few, faith abounds. - MOS Atheism is a unique "-ism": followers are not bound by a shared form of belief in, but rather a shared form of disbelief in. - MOS |
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swstephe
Tenured Poster  Usergroup: Moderators Joined: Apr 20, 2006 Location: Borneo Island ... no, really Total Topics: 30 Total Posts: 4099 |
#14
First, you will have to solve the longstanding controversy over the origin of the Torah. When was it written? It is traditionally believed that Moses had a few small scrolls from patriarchs and described the law as it was revealed over 40 years, which became the Torah. A lot of people have problems with this tradition. How can Moses describe his own death and the subsequent final crossing of the Jordan? Was it just a prediction? Then there is the whole documentary analysis controversy. What is accepted as a single "Torah", appears to be several different narrations integrated into a single document: a "Yawehist", "Elohist", and "Priestly" narrative. Differences between these stories lead to criticism of contradictions, but the best an independent observer could surmise is that the Torah was handed down as oral transmission for some time, probably starting during Babylonian captivity -- about the time the events end. Oral traditions tend to get distorted over time with each re-telling. Some of the stories seem to have been influenced by Babylonian stories, (the tower of Babel and the great flood, for example). Shortly after it was written down, in Hebrew, the Hebrew language died out, except for reciting the written narration. Christianity makes the same claim. That those who witnessed the actual events were alive long enough to verify the accuracy of the written record. But it shares the problem that the church was supposed to pass through a period of persecution where documents were lost. The reliability of what remains of Christian scriptures depends heavily on what early church writers mention about certain books, and assumptions about the correspondence between what was known and what was written. I do seem to remember a process where you people ask me questions and I give you answers, and then I ask you questions and you give me answers, and that's the way we find out things. I think I read that in a manual somewhere. -- Haywood Floyd 2010 |
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oldandrew
Professor  Usergroup: Members Joined: Oct 19, 2008 Location: United Kingdom Total Topics: 1 Total Posts: 707 Last Blog: A Guide To Scenes From The Battleground.
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#15
sgittles101 wrote: So basically, the reasoning is this: In the Jewish Torah, it speaks of ten plagues, the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, countless miracles, and finally the revelation of 'God' in front of ALL the nation at Mt Sinai. The minute the Torah claims that the whole nation saw the miracles/revelation/etc, it includes all Jews in it's supernatural claims. The logic here is, if according to the Torah all Jews saw this and promptly celebrated their first Passover in commemoration of said miracles, than how could these supernatural claims be refuted? They aren't private revelations, they are public. And the testimony of the veracity of these claims have been handed down from father to son for years- as witnessed by the Jewish tradition of celebrating Passover every year. The first Passover had to be after these revelations, or else at the 'fake', later first Passover someone would ask 'but then how come we didn't do this last year..?' Especially since the TEXT of the Torah is supposedly unchangeable. So how could all this have been made up? It comes down to placing faith (trust) in a community's traditions. We all do this, but in some cultures it is more transparent than in others. It would be a mistake to just declare this to be wrong. sgittles101 wrote: How could such a mass scam have been pulled off? I can see a couple of ways that all of this can make sense, but they're pretty out there and close to grasping at straws. What do you guys think? Is there any way that this tradition of shared revelation and supposed miraculous history could have been made up or evolved considerably? How, if such stringecy is placed on not changing the words of the Torah's text? Do you really need to explain it? You could have an excellent explanation and the belief could still be true, similarly a belief could be false without it being known how it came to be believed. When people come up with speculative accounts of how things came to be believed they tend to end up in pseudo-history. They also tend to end up assuming that everybody in the past, or who still believes in the present, was, or is, stupid. I think we have to accept that if there was an easy explanation as to how such things could be false then nobody would have believed them in the first place. Religions are believed because they seem to be true. People who declare religions are irrational or without evidence are engaged in wishful thinking. However, just because something has evidence, or is rational, does not mean it is true. |
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Desidude666
Professor  Usergroup: Members Joined: Jun 17, 2007 Location: Singapore Total Topics: 2 Total Posts: 881 |
#16
sgittles101 wrote: That's the thing though. Moses ISNT a reliable source. If everything hinged on Moses' private revelation I would not even be here asking questions. MY point is, though, that unlike Christianity and Islam, in which revelation is private, apparently the Jewish 'revelation' was public and henceforth passed down, from father to child. This would make it hard to refute logically without assuming a whole generation of Jews were either incredibly stupid, gullible, or massively high and experiencing mass delusion all the time. This is exactly my problem. Now my point to you is that: All religions today are passed down in the exact same manner - from father to child. How are Jews that different? A believer protestant Christian has as much belief in his trinity as the Jews have in Yahweh (they aren't the same btw, since Thou Shalt Not Worship Another God fails in the very first point). How different is it? How different is it from personal revelation of a Christian and, this general Jewish inheritance of their cultural beliefs? How different is a belief in personal revelation of a evangelist Christian and his/her teaching that to his child and the Jewish revelation? The trouble is that you think it's different when it's not. sgittles101 wrote: I completely agree with you. Abraham is NOT evidence. But no one is even arguin that. That would just be stupid. My question is about the supposed PUBLIC revelation, and specifically this one- because it is much harder to logically discard. Public revelation doesn't exist because you cannot verify this claim. That settles your point! Inheritance cannot be verified, hence cannot be accepted as the point of acceptance. sgittles101 wrote: And I'm sorry- I totally didnt mean to impose anything on others. That's not me, and I apologize if I came across like that. I totally left my religion a while ago because i think its pretty much bullcrap- and I'm only 15- so trust me when I say I am not trying to foist my beliefs, religious or otherwise, on other people. I've been burned very badly by people who impose their beleifs. Sure thing young man, don't worry about it. It's a good path you're walking in life, at such a young age. I would prefer that you ask all the questions and not come with a conclusion (atheism or theism, two extremes). There is no point in confirming an extreme, because at the end of it there is nothing to add to it. So in that sense, I might also suggest either keeping your own intellect as open as possible, or ignore it if you can't. sgittles101 wrote: Right, so I know in general there are flaws, but I'm not so clear as to what exactly they are. Like, the flat earth thing... does it actually say that in Jewish text? Because I was aware of a statement that actually said the world was a circle- still wrong, of course, because the Earth is a sphere. But yeah. Are there any really glaring inaccuracies that I haven't heard of? Revelation, that's the claim. The claims are just too radical. I don't mind an idea of a 'God' or a divinity (the unknown as known by prominent physicists), but then, I dispute worship and probably the idea of organization of this worship. And if decree is established for this orgnanization then there are moral/ethical and logical fallacies that one has to ignore for participation. I dispute that. sgittles101 wrote: Thank you soooo much! I appreciate it!  No problem, keep on asking questions, never make up your mind. Don't stay intellectually still ever! Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude. - Arthur Schopenhauer |
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