(April 29, 2020 at 10:03 am)Rhondazvous Wrote: According to what I've read, the Torah was written four centuries after King David died.
1. How can he talk about the law (the law is contained in the Torah or Pentateuch) and commandments of god when the law hadn't been written yet?
2. How could Moses have written the law when he was born (as a character in ancient mythology not a historical figure) before David?
3. What did the Jews read before the Torah?
4. The Torah was wiritten a during the Babylonian Exile. Could it be said then that Judaism was created to solidify the Jews as a people and the Torah is a rewrite of Jewish history?
When did any upstart religion in human history take hold? Worldwide in all of our species history, and especially back in antiquity, we did not have sudden mass media like we do now. But competition of resources and ideas took place, even back then.
The mythology of Buddha is a perfect example of why all religions are simply a matter of long term, not one single event, but long term social competition of ideas. If you ask one sect of Buddhist where he was born, they will say one thing. Ask another sect of Buddhist and they will give you another location. But funny how Hinduism is far older, but share some of the same motifs such as reincarnation and Karma. And even the earliest mythologies of Buddha had his Queen mother Maya being told by the divine world she would give birth to a child who would bring wisdom to the world, and even he avoided standard birth in that mythology and was born out of her side.
There is no one mythology that lead to Jews or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus.
The reality of all religions is that they only take hold out of story telling, competition with others and mythology.
If our species had never concocted any of the major popular religions we know today, we would have made up something else.
Think about all the other dead religions in the world that nobody believes in. And then ponder what life will look like in 10,000 years if humans don't kill ourselves off. In the future we can expect to see current religions morph into something unrecognizable, or completely die out and be seen as the mythologies we accept as such today.
BUT, in regards to the Hebrew religion, my take on it is that it is nothing more than a long term result of competing Canaanite polytheistic tribes in which "Yahweh" was a lesser god in the divine family under the head god "El". The first known Hebrews simply won the PR battle between tribes and replaced "El" with "Yahweh" and those winners ended up writing the earliest Jewish holy writings long term.
You cant pinpoint the exact moment any religion in human history starts. You can only observe marketing, and competition and popularity that arises over time.
