(April 13, 2014 at 4:53 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Don't forget that both Israel Finkelstein and Egyptologist Donald Redford have arrived at a late 7th century BC date for the concoction of the exodus story using independent lines of evidence. I don't think you can get from Point "A" (Thera) to Point "B" (Yahweh the Bloody-Handed) with out a lot of intermediate steps along the way. It was a 1,000 years later.
Not sure you are making the same point I am but this is precisely the point. Over time humans move around and power shifts and lots of mixing and hand me down stories. It isn't just analogous of when you were a kid sitting in a circle telling a story and by the time it gets back to you, it may contain the same motifs but has completely different details. Imagine more than one circle and not just one circle but many over long periods of time. Like the Olympic symbol intertwining. Some circles remain int tact, some motifs we see no connection to because one ring is at one end of the chain while the similar ring is at the other end of the chain but not connected.
The simple solution to why all religions and god claims exist is because they are a result of competing and prior cultures. What are not real are the gods of any of them. Not knowing how a story ended up in a book does not make the fantastic claims in it true. It merely means that story is there because someone prior picked up on it and it got filtered down through time to the point someone put it in a book.
