Blog post help
Offline Hey guys and gals, just for some fun competition with my girlfriend I've started my own little blog "Godless Paladin" and have decided to write a four part serries answering the "44 questions for the skeptic" listed on christiananswers.net. I am not quite sure how to refute one of the questions and thought I'd might ask the wonderful people of RRS for some help. "How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places, and people?" Now I know this is bullshit. The bible also said there was a massive flood 4000 years ago that would have killed off all of the Egyptians... If you want to see the full list of questions, they're here . OH! And if you'd be ever so kind, could you click on the link to my blog, you don't even have to read it or stay for more than a second, I just need to beat my girlfriend in hits so she has to take me out to dinner. ~_^
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I would love to know what this vast archaeological documentation consists of. From Kathleen Kenyan who disproved the walls of Jerico to Israel Finkelstein who demonstrated that there was minimum settlement in the region of Isreal during the periods claimed in the Bible, archaeology pretty much demonstrates that the Bible is bullshit.
It takes a village to raise an idiot.
Save a tree, eat a vegetarian.
Sometimes " The Majority " only means that all the fools are on the same side.
This should get you started on the historical inaccuracy of the Bible.
1. Exodus: The Bible tells us that some 600,000 men of fighting age left Egypt with their families and animals, raising the number of transients to around 3,000,000. Archaeological surveys show us that total population density of Egypt at this time ( late bronze age ) was only 3,000,000. We know for certain that the entire population of Egypt did not leave.
2. Jericho: Kathleen Kenyan's dig there demonstrated a sparsely populated, unwalled settlement during the time of Joshua.
3. Tyre: The Bible tells us that Tyre was totally destroyed, with not a stone left standing. Tyre has been inhabited continuously for the last 4,000 years.
4. Ai: The Bible says that Ai was totally destroyed by Joshua. Baptist professor Joseph Callaway excavated at Ai for12`years. What he learned was that Ai was destroyed and abandoned around 2,400 BCE. The area was unoccupied during the Late Bronze Age. There was simply no city there for Joshua to destroy.
5. Flood: There is no evidence whatsoever for any global flood. What we do have is evidence that the Hebrew borrowed the flood story from the Babylonians, who in turn borrowed it from the Sumerians.
6. Genesis Creation Story: The story is a thinly veiled copy of the Enuma Elish. The whole " darkness upon the deep portion disproves the fundamentalist Ex Nihilo concept once you understand the mythology of the Near East. The word translated as deep is Tehom. Tehom is a variation of the Babylonian Tiamat, symbolizing chaos water. Tiamat was slain and cut in half by Marduk in the Enuma Elish in order to create the earth.
7. Genesis in general: The book fails to name virtually any of the truly ancient cities that dominated the Near East at the dawn of recorded history.
8. King of Arad: The Bible mentions a clash with hin during the Exodus. Archaeology shows the area to be unoccupied between 2,200-1,150 BCE, the timeframe for the Exodus.
9. Exodus revisited: Archaeology has failed to find a single piece of evidence for this event. Furthermore, simple math can be used to disprove it. Three million people, walking four abreast in regimented rank would stretch from Egypt all the way into Israel. The front of the train would be in Israel before the rear guard had left Egypt. Add the animal herd to this and the train would stretch some 500 miles long, still in tight formation. It would have taken this army over two weeks to cross the sea of reeds. It also should be pointed out that these people were not so well disciplined as to travel in regimental ranks, so you can multiply the length of the train by 10.
10. Jesus' birth: The Bible says that Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod, and when Quiriunius was governer. Herod died in 4 BCE, while Quiriunius became governer in 6 CE. They did not overlap.
It takes a village to raise an idiot.
Save a tree, eat a vegetarian.
Sometimes " The Majority " only means that all the fools are on the same side.
clicked.
Hahaha, the stupid "the professor has no brain" story was at the end of the 44 questions.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Ok, so the bible gets a few things right. So what? The bible was written by people as a combination of history and fables. This means that some parts of the bible were meant to be stories stictly for the purpose of teaching morals. The other part of the bible is a history of the people. This history survived in oral tradition for generation before it was written down and is subject to both the change that happens over time due to oral story telling and the bias that comes from the group that records the history and change due to whatever polotics were going on at various times.
That's fairly easy. A "huge amount of archeological evidence" there is not. In fact, the whole of exodus remains a mystery, or vanished into the desert. Just because they mention some towns that may or may not have been involved in battles (much of the old testament involves the tribe of Israel slaughtering entire cities) gives us no connection. Evidence of the towns themselves is not evidence that any characters from the bible visited.
Anyway, good luck winning - I clicked.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Thanks for the clicks, I won. ^_^ phew, now I get dinner and I don't have to kiss my housemate on the cheek...
I've had a similar encounter with a professor of mine who visited Israel and said things even "measured" similarly as the Bible states. It may be a simplistic rebuttal, but I pretty much said the following:
In Harry Potter, J K Rowling describes London and the London train station that exists. Does that mean in 1,000 years that people will believe that Harry Potter is an historical document, and that Platform 9 3/4s must be real?
You can insert any of your favorite fiction books that have clear descriptions of real cities... maybe you can even find one that is much better than this.
Just my two cents!
Many references in the bible are to people and places for whom corroboratory data exists, at least to help confirm their own existence or to support the notion that the tradition in which they were regarded as historical characters and places by the jews was one shared by other cultures too. Archaeology has played a role in furthering that corroboration. But of course that is not the "proof" the questioner is alluding to.
Where archaeology and the bible part company big time is in providing back-up for the claims made with regard to events, dates and actions undertaken by these characters in the biblical texts. To make matters worse, archaeology conducted in the area pre-1948 was typified by attempts to "prove" biblical accuracy, and post-1948 with a particularly zionist and nationalistic drive by the Israeli state to justify its new-found existence. Both approaches are subjective, and subjective or prejudicial archaeological investigation throws a question mark not over the findings of its practitioners but on all related research. When such research is eliminated from the substantial body of work produced on the subject we are actually left with very little at all emanating from the principle sites, and a growing body of more impartial work emanating from outside of Israel which casts even more serious doubt on that which has been published so far.
So, when a person asks the question as phrased above it is absolutely necessary to inform them that - as in any area of research - quantity does not infer quality and when the more dubious publications which make up that quantity of "biblcal proofs" are eliminated there is practically no quality remaining. In fact, not only is there then no objectively obtained "vast archaeological documentation of biblical stories" but there is by now on the other hand quite an impressive ouvre assembled of authoritative and impartial work which seriously questions almost all of the bible's specific historical claims.
No person who actually appreciates archaeology as an impartial scientific endeavour to understand our past would ever make such an assumption as is contained in the question, and the questioner should be reminded that while agenda-driven assumptions might be a mainstay of religious affiliation, they are anathema to the field of science being referred to. The questioner, in other words, is simply revealing a double ignorance in even attempting to ask it.
My own reaction would be simply to laugh, I imagine.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy