God Yahweh Allah was a volcano.

[Gawdzilla]

When the level of bravado dies down a bit, please read in full.....

http://www.scientus.org/Wegener-Continental-Drift.html

I was hearing about continental drift in high school, '64-'69. Your argument fails again.

---

I was taught Plate Tectonics in school in the 70's Hannah... 40 years ago. Yes Wegener's theory was abandoned until the 60's, where the causal mechanisms were described.
What's the problem with acknowledging the fact?

You know the point I was trying to make assehole.

The Mid-Ocean Rift sealed his case for him. And you're still flailing around. Go home, do some work, see if you can heal the gaping wounds in your pet theory.

[Hannah]

Look, Hannah. Exodus isn't the revealed word, and it isn't a historical account. It doesn't have to be one or the other. People are capable of fiction, always have been. It's almost an insult to those people when you assume they just couldn't write fiction. However, if you want the description of god to be a Volcano, that's fine, but source the description of god farther back. Hebrews were Canaanites, they didn't steal pharoah's gold and flee through the Saudi Desert. Mt. Sinai is not somewhere else, etc etc etc.

You don't know for sure it's not got some historical truth in it. You cannot prove it so, according to your strict set of rules, you shouldn't even claim it. Now if I was wanting to get people to sign up to my religion and I wrote a fictious book to do just that, I would miss out a whole load of the Bible. There is too much in there, with weird ficticously unecessary details, for it to have been pure fiction. It also contains things that paint the religion or some of the prophets in a bad light. Two lines in it reveal the fact Moses was a cold blooded and pre-meditated murderer. That fact in no way aides the religion nor encourages people to believe. Why, then, include it? Another example is revealing the theft of the Egyptians' gold. Why include that in a story book? Why make the Hebrews look like thieves when they weren't? Why create the future potential for Egytian retribution? Why paint a very obvious picture of them going from one volcano to the next? Why make it pretty clear in a ficiticous book yahweh was a volcano or volcanoes? Why not start the whole thing off with him being intangible and omnipresent? Why did he only become omnipresent over time? Why say in the Bible that yahweh directed the Hebrews to Saudi (which it does) and say they lived in awful conditons with scorpions and no water, and to say in this story book they were left wandering around for forty years in the wilderness thanks to yahweh? That just makes no sense whatsoever. It's illogical. If the book was written to sell the religion then it fails there badly. Why say yahweh was rubbish at giving directions? Why say he was so mean he let them wander around for forty years? His chosen people too!!! The ones he is said to love so much! It doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that they did go to Saudi because they went towards the plume of smoke by day and fire by night, they did find themselves in shitty surroundings and get stung to death by creatures they'd never seen before, they were awe struck at the sight of their first volcano, Moses' face was bright red and sweaty when he came down from the mount after talking to the lake of fire, they did see other eruptions in the distance and believed they were signs from god of their route (which is why they arrived where they did), yahweh was their first jealous god and therefore the first time they'd ever had only one god, Moses did lead them down a merry path and cause them to wander about for years and die off in old age and exhaustion, they finally find some hospitable land but find it's occupied by other civilisations so create the 'promised land' idea to justify genocide...etc.... This makes perfect sense to me.

Even the way it's written makes it seem like more of a diary of events than a story book. I believe some books were based on diarised real events but were dramatised with divinity and poetic licence, although the latter may have been used in the most part due to the language at the time and the lack of knowledge that would have provided one word rather than many to describe something. Some books, like Genesis, were written completely retrospectively and ficticiously and moulded to fit the dramatised diaries. They filled in the gaps, just like some ficticious verses fill in gaps between truth.

I'll have a closer look later tonight at those two links you posted last night.

[The Grand Nudger]

You're asking me why fiction contains elements of fiction? God was omnipresent in the very first words of the bible, if you choose to believe it as a literal creation epic. He was at least powerful over every aspect of the lives of believers, if you choose to interpret it as a metaphor. By the time Exodus became a narrative, people already believed in the God of Exodus. They had for a very very long time.

These are all facts Hannah, and had you clicked on a single link that many of us have attached, you would already know this. Don't argue with me, argue with the evidence.

[Gawdzilla]

[Minimalist]

He just wanted to open up the debate. Just like me...I just wanted to do some brains storming.

And the resulting fire storm should have been sufficient to convince you that you are wasting your time trying to breathe life back into an absurd story. Sadly, you never seem to get the hint. Running back and pulling more bible verses out of your ass is not going to prove that the first bible verses were any more reliable. They are all the same shit.

You don't know for sure it's not got some historical truth in it.

As a matter of fact, we pretty much do. But, if you want to see for yourself, open up a new thread and ask the fundie morons WHEN the exodus happened? If any of them take you up on it you'll get a range of dates from the Old Kingdom to Ramesses the Great. Remember we need a period of almost 1,000 years. 480 years in "bondage" the Exodus and then 480 years until "Solomon" ( who does not seem to have existed either ) builds the fucking temple....of which not a single stone has ever been found nor any non-blblical reference to it.

Remember no references to Hebrew slaves in Egypt...no institution of mass slavery in Egypt for that matter in the time period in question, either. No archaeological evidence of them in Sinai. No evidence of the enemies they supposedly overcame until much later. No evidence of them entering Canaan from the outside and no evidence of any "Conquest." How many times does your fucking bible have to be wrong before you give it up?

[Shell B]

Here is the problem, you say that you want to open up debate about it, but the debate part sets you off on a tangent, Hannah. You can't have a debate about something or even reach the core of a hypothesis (term used loosely), if you are unwilling to look at other sides of the issue. You have to take into account that what other people are saying here might be true. You can't just assume something is true based on a book. Like others have said, it would be better to have archaeological evidence. All I see here is, "You disagree with me? You're an idiot asshole, then."

[thesummerqueen]

Hannah,

There's absolutely nothing wrong with asking questions about anything. I don't know how old you are, but I bet anyone my age remembers the cartoon and books for "The Magic Schoolbus" in which Ms Frizzle always said "If you keep asking questions, you'll keep getting answers."

The problem comes from getting defensive when we point out that many, if not all, of your questions and hypotheses have been put forward and been debated. There's no shame in not knowing - there are only so many hours in the day to use for research and reading - but that's where having people disagree with you can help. They might have information you haven't happened to find yet. Not any one of us has all the answers, but a few of us have a good head start in a few different directions.

I haven't finished re-reading everything, but it also seems to me that you left off a crucial factor in figuring out your "mysteries" - Biblical language. Hebrew does not translate quite as neatly to English or to Greek, and that may affect how your reading goes. It already takes scholarship to properly read English translations of the Bible to ascertain what the literature was meant to represent. Now compound that with the fact that in Hebrew, it is more likely to say something along the lines of "He is like a lion," which can mean (in English) that he is courageous, or he is strong, or he is a warrior. You see what I mean.

Depending on the translation I got, I could interpret burning bush to be a bush on fire, or because of my gardening bias I could say it might have been a species of plant Moses had never encountered before whose leaves turned into the color of flames. Our maple in the front yard of my house turns into a huge orange ball in the autumn, so vivid it almost glows in the sunlight.

You like your idea, and that's great, but unless you have real evidence for it to combat the evidence that's already been presented, you're going to be hard-pressed to change people's minds. There's no conspiracy in history or science to suppress ideas (except perhaps in religion). Good ideas bear up under scrutiny, and bad ones get chucked onto the wayside, or get refined into something better.

[Hannah]

You're asking me why fiction contains elements of fiction? God was omnipresent in the very first words of the bible, if you choose to believe it as a literal creation epic. He was at least powerful over every aspect of the lives of believers, if you choose to interpret it as a metaphor. By the time Exodus became a narrative, people already believed in the God of Exodus. They had for a very very long time.

These are all facts Hannah, and had you clicked on a single link that many of us have attached, you would already know this. Don't argue with me, argue with the evidence.

Had you read all my comments then you would know I believe Genesis is entirely fabricated to fit the story, make Yahweh omnipresent and give a happy ancestral past to a bunch of gypsy-type vagabonds. It packaged everything up. The Books of Moses all being written at the same time allows for fact to be weaved into fiction very neatly. Genesis is like an introduction and, like all introductions, was written restrospectively. If I'm wrong then how come Yahweh goes from being omnipresent in the first book of the Bible to not omnipresent in the second? The Books of Moses will have been written around the time of the Exodus and the journey to Israel, by which time Yahweh HAD to become omnipresent because there are no volcanoes there. Yahweh starts off omnipresent in the Bible, becomes site specific in the early OT and then becomes omnipresent again later on. Yahweh in the early Bible, after Genesis, is described as the god who brought Israel out of Egypt and that gave them the law. He is not described as a loving or forgiving god. In the early OT, he is to be honoured because of what he did for them.....in their minds rescued them from Egypt. He materialised while they were in Egypt and just before they left. They only started to worship him when they stood in front of him and Moses got the law from him...supposedly. That is when the deal was struck.

If you only answer one question...answer this one. If the Hebrews had been worshipping Yahweh for ages and ages before the supposed Exodus date, why is it that the Bible states Moses asked him what his name was on Mt Sinai? If Judaism started prior to this moment, whether it be ficticious or not, why set the starting point at this moment? They may have been influenced by previous 'pagan' gods prior to coming together and arriving at 'the most high' but none of those previous gods were Yahweh and all of them were wiped out by the worship of Yahweh.

[thesummerqueen]

Had you read all my comments then you would know I believe Genesis is entirely fabricated to fit the story, make Yahweh omnipresent and give a happy ancestral past to a bunch of gypsy-type vagabonds. It packaged everything up. The Books of Moses all being written at the same time allows for fact to be weaved into fiction very neatly. Genesis is like an introduction and, like all introductions, was written restrospectively. If I'm wrong then how come Yahweh goes from being omnipresent in the first book of the Bible to not omnipresent in the second?

For the same reason Jesus is portrayed differently in all of the Gospels.

The Books of Moses will have been written around the time of the Exodus and the journey to Israel, by which time Yahweh HAD to become omnipresent because there are no volcanoes there. Yahweh starts off omnipresent in the Bible, becomes site specific in the early OT and then becomes omnipresent again later on. Yahweh in the early Bible, after Genesis, is described as the god who brought Israel out of Egypt and that gave them the law. He is not described as a loving or forgiving god. In the early OT, he is to be honoured because of what he did for them.....in their minds rescued them from Egypt. He materialised while they were in Egypt and just before they left. They only started to worship him when they stood in front of him and Moses got the law from him...supposedly. That is when the deal was struck.

Rabbinical and general Biblical scholars would disagree. There are ways to analyze language to tell how stories came to be written down and when, and if they were based on older myths.

If you only answer one question...answer this one. If the Hebrews had been worshipping Yahweh for ages and ages before the supposed Exodus date, why is it that the Bible states Moses asked him what his name was on Mt Sinai? If Judaism started prior to this moment, whether it be ficticious or not, why set the starting point at this moment? They may have been influenced by previous 'pagan' gods prior to coming together and arriving at 'the most high' but none of those previous gods were Yahweh and all of them were wiped out by the worship of Yahweh.

Abraham is considered the first Jew, because he refused to worship idols. In the *Story* of the Egyptian enslavement, Jews were already known as Jews. Made no sense for them to become Jews later. Moses asked God's name for literary effect. It makes a good story.

[Hannah]

Good ideas bear up under scrutiny, and bad ones get chucked onto the wayside, or get refined into something better.

No. People tend to like ideas that match their own pre-conceived ideas and hate ideas that threaten everything they've grown to know. Good ideas are notorious for being laughed at and hated.