#book of exodus – @religion-is-a-mental-illness on Tumblr

From today's WSJ. Self-publish indeed.

Funny how God's most important work was delivered to humanity using technology that was available at the time. If he'd sent them laser engraved titanium tablets, we'd still have the finely inscribed originals today.

And proof of divinity.

For an all-powerful god who can create an entire universe exactly how he wishes with just a word, there is no deed which is any more difficult than any other deed. They are exactly as trivial. Anything he does for you is no more difficult or meaningful than not doing it at all. Bestowing personalized, laser-engraved titanium tablets to each and every human on Earth is no more difficult than producing stone tablets... or doing nothing at all.

Instead, we get crap like this.

Exodus 24:12

And the Lord said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.

Exodus 31:18

And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.

Exodus 32:14-19

And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.

And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.

And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.

And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.

And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear.

And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

Exodus 34:1-5

And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.

And be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning unto mount Sinai, and present thyself there to me in the top of the mount.

And no man shall come up with thee, neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.

And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone.

And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

Exodus 34:27-32

And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.

And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.

And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses' hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.

And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him.

And Moses called unto them; and Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned unto him: and Moses talked with them.

And afterward all the children of Israel came nigh: and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him in mount Sinai.

The god of creation didn't think to make the tablets indestructible, and when they were broken, instead of reconstituting them, asked Moses to make some more, traipse back up the mountain, proposed that "I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest" but then couldn't be bothered - or just plain forgot - and "the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words."

And the whole thing took almost six weeks. Twice.

The universe was created in 6 days, but two tablets with 10 dot points on them took two attempts, each 40 days. And Lord still didn't learn from the first time, because he didn't think to make the second set any more indestructible than the first. Even magic unbreakable stone would have been a true miracle to declare himself to the world.

This is a stupid book, containing a stupid story about a stupid god. How anyone thinks this is the greatest story ever told is beyond me, when it's not even in the top 1000 least facepalmy stories.

#ask #bible #bible study #Exodus #The Ten Commandments #stone tablets #Moses #Book of Exodus #Mount Sinai #Mt. Sinai #religion #christianity #judaism #greatest story ever told #Ten Commandments #incompetent god #god of incompetence #religion is a mental illness

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quicksandjesus95 asked:

What do you think about that they found wheels and horse bones at the bottom of the red sea, and that some are claiming that thats proof of Exodus bring true

LOL. It's like saying that we found a piece of the door frame of the RMS Titanic, therefore the movie Titanic is true. Or if I find a large footprint-shaped impression in the ground, that's proof Bigfoot exists.

Which is to say, that isn't how proof works. To "prove" something, you have to account for all the other possible explanations, and why they are either untrue or less likely. Than what is, let's face it, literal magic. Have the items been dated? Have they identified their origin? How did they figure out how long they've been down there? Where are the rest of the parts? What are they the parts to? Why did they survive? Shouldn't there be more of them for the story?

Even Jewish scholars say the Exodus didn't happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Origins_and_historicity

Most mainstream scholars do not accept the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons.

[..]

The Book of Numbers further states that the number of Israelite males aged 20 years and older in the desert during the wandering were 603,550, including 22,273 first-borns, which modern estimates put at 2.5-3 million total Israelites, a number that could not be supported by the Sinai Desert through natural means. The geography is vague with regions such as Goshen unidentified, and there are internal problems with dating in the Pentateuch. No modern attempt to identify an historical Egyptian prototype for Moses has found wide acceptance, and no period in Egyptian history matches the biblical accounts of the Exodus.

[..]

While ancient Egyptian texts from the New Kingdom mention "Asiatics" living in Egypt as slaves and workers, these people cannot be securely connected to the Israelites, and no contemporary Egyptian text mentions a large-scale exodus of slaves like that described in the Bible.

The reasons include that there would have been 2,000,000 Israelites wandering around a patch of land that you can walk across in a week, which would have also meant that, walking 10 abreast (200,000 rows of people) with a comfortable walking distance between each row (e.g. 2m), those at the head of the procession would have reached beyond the halfway point before the last people departed (2,000,000 people / 10 abreast x 2m row spacing = 400,000m = 400km).

Egypt losing 2,000,000 residents, including a slave workforce of at least 600,000 (if we count only males), would have been recorded somewhere, and would have dramatically affected the economics, the social dynamics and other factors of the area. Nobody seems to have noticed. And Egypt was notorious for its record keeping, even the unsavory parts.

As with the myth of the flood, it's possible some small-scale event was the origin of this myth. Localized flooding can easily be mythologized up into a global flood that killed everybody... except the Chinese, Aztecs, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, tribes of Africa, etc, etc, who never noticed they were all apparently drowned but never knew it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Potential_historical_origins

Despite the absence of any archaeological evidence, most scholars nonetheless hold the view that the Exodus probably has some sort of historical basis, with Kenton Sparks referring to it as "mythologized history". Scholars posit that a small group of people of Egyptian origin may have joined the early Israelites, and then contributed their own Egyptian Exodus story to all of Israel.

So, we can accept that an exodus occurred, while rejecting the notion that The Exodus, as described in the bible, actually occurred.

Anyone wishing to propose this discovery is proof of the bible will need to disprove more mundane explanations.

Because the Exodus describes specific magical events. There's a very long distance between the mundane story of three dozen Egyptian outcasts leaving town and joining the Israelites, and the magical epic saga of plagues, death of the firstborn, two million people walking across the desert for 40 years, magical, physics-defying fluid dynamics, and all the other shenanigans that is the Exodus mythology of the bible.

As someone once pointed out, even the characters in Exodus act like they live in a storybook land. The Pharaoh is just like, sure, we live in a land where magic is real and I have people who work for me who can do it. The Israelites are like, sure, a divine being from on high freed us with his hand and held back the waters of the sea, but we're going to worship this golden calf we made because we live in a world where magic and gods are everywhere, so that kind of shit isn't going to impress us into thinking a single uniquely divine creature exists, because why would we?

#ask #red sea #book of exodus #exodus myth #exodus #old testament #crossing the red sea #parting of the sea #bible #bible nonsense #bible stories #bible study #mythology #bible mythology #religion #religion is a mental illness

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hokeypokeyslopokechokey

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Every time you talk about him, your god sounds more and more made up.

Allegory, my dude.

religion-is-a-mental-illness

Therefore, god is an allegory too. Excellent.

If the story is metaphorical, then we can conclude the characters are as well. If Genesis is a metaphor and Creation didn’t happen exactly as described, then so are Original Sin and Jesus. Sweet!

Nobody ever explains what it’s an allegory for though. They say “allegory” and they think that solves the problem. It makes it worse, not better, and erodes the belief system in the process.

Especially when the scripture doesn’t clearly explain it to be allegorical, and both Judaism and Xtianity have - and in many cases still do - insist it’s literally true, have gone to war over it. Judaism is entirely based on the premise that they are Lord’s Chosen people. As described in the book that they wrote.

It’s funny how we need to use reality to determine what’s a true in the bible, rather than the other way around. What’s true about the bible changes depending on what humans know, rather than vice versa. This makes the bible subservient to science, anthropology, history, etc. That is, the bible is not authoritative.

Saying “allegory” is acknowledging that we can throw the bible away entirely. We might as well just go straight to the higher power: human knowledge.

#bible #bible study #christianity #allegory #metaphor #it's a metaphor #religion #Book of Exodus #Exodus #fictional characters #religion is a mental illness