An argument I keep hearing from theists is that Jews and Muslims have been fighting for thousands of years and that the Bible predicted this will be the case until the "end times" in which God will deliver the Jews. They cite the increasing rise in antisemitism in places like the US as evidence of things worsening before the Antichrist comes and deceives everyone by making them think he's a good guy when he's really a bad guy, and then the world goes to shit with the Tribulation and so on.
Can we hash out how and why this is wrong? I am new to critical thinking and logical fallacies, so please don't rip me a new one. ;)
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Well Islam didn't exist until just after 600 CE, so it's a bit premature to talk about Jews and Muslims "fighting for thousands of years". The Arab (Muslim)-Jewish conflict really began with the emergence of Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and Arab nationalism in the late 19th century. The Jews decided that their ancient homeland was in an awful, worthless area of Arab-occupied land called Palestine. After kicking out the Ottoman Turks in World War I (Lawrence of Arabia, etc.), the British government basically gave away an area of Arab land (Palestine) to the Jews through the Balfour Declaration. Jewish migration to the region started to accelerate, especially after the rise of the Nazis. And the Arabs and Jews have been at each other's throats ever since.
The Biblical story goes back to Abraham. Abraham and his wife Sarai couldn't have children, so Sarai arranged for Abraham to impregnate her slave, Hagar. Hagar bore Ishmael as Abraham's first son, but then god decided that Sarai, then in her late eighties, could get pregnant after all. She gave birth to Isaac, and Abraham later kicked Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert to die. Ishmael is supposedly the ancestor of Mohamed.
So the Arab-Jew conflict is a shameful catalogue of stupid religious bullshit, colonial greed and stupidity, and vicious nationalism that has spilled over into global terrorism. And at least one side in this idiotic mess has nukes.
My bad choice of wording. They claim that the friction has always been there since Isaac and Ishmael were brothers. God supposedly blessed Ishmael and his descendants, but he only made his covenant with Isaac and his descendants. The "fighting" was said to begin there and has continued ever since.
So is there any truth that there was this kind of conflict prior to Jesus's (supposed) arrival or before the 19th century?
I appreciate the detailed history you gave. History class in my Christian school was a joke.
@Dragonfly: So is there any truth that there was this kind of conflict prior to Jesus's (supposed) arrival or before the 19th century?
I'm no expert, but I don't think so. For example, Jews and Muslims lived together in harmony in both Moorish Spain and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. As far as Ishmael and Isaac are concerned, I suspect that the ancient dispute over what god supposedly promised to whom is just being used to justify the territorial claims. It's interesting that both sides claim descent from the same fictional ancestor. They're basically the same people.
I suggest you Google items like Arabs in the ancient world, history of Palestine, Jewish Diaspora, and so on.
Do all or most atheists believe Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Ishmael were fictional? When you say "they're basically the same people," I don't understand.
I've been Googling all of this to death, and unfortunately I keep running into sites that have a religious agenda. I think I'll try to find a good history site and work from there. I'm not sure Wikipedia would be any good. Do you have a recommendation? Did you just know all of that history in your first post off the top of your head, or did you go to a source? I'm impressed. I'd like to be as knowledgeable as you are about these things.
When he said they are basically the same people, he meant Jews and Arabs (Semitic).
Abraham and family are fictional. So is Noah and Moses. The Exodus itself is fiction. It's just origin myths.
Would you mind sharing how you came to the conclusion that Abraham/his family, Noah, Moses, and the Exodus are fictional?
Well you can start here.
@Breezy: how you came to the conclusion that Abraham/his family, Noah, Moses, and the Exodus are fictional?
Well apart from anything else, does it sound plausible that a octogenarian could bear a healthy child after being impregnated by a centenarian?
@orignal post by Dragonfly
It is pretty easy after centuries of strife, conflict and warfare, to predict that Jewish and Muslim people will fight for as long as both are around and lay claim to the same land.
Many religions have made predictions to end times, and so far, every single religion prediction of the "end times" has been wrong so far. Quite the exceptional unbroken track record for being wrong. Either it is vague and open ended when the end time will come, (worthless, useless, unhelpful prediction that means nothing.) Or they have picked specific times, and to the surprise of no critical thinker, nothing happened on that specific date, the "end time" did not come.
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Strife between neighbors is a very common human occurrence. Be it the Irish and British, or Greeks against Turks, or one of many tribes in the mid-east, someone always has a beef with another tribe. So to see the Jews and Arabs at each other's throats is not a surprise, it is something to be expected.
Indeed, but Jews and Arabs add a religious component.
They all add a religious component. The Irish are Roman Catholic, the Brits Protestant. The Macedonian Struggle was religious in nature. Every tribe has their own religious content, and that is mixed into the conflict.
@David Killens: Be it the Irish and British
The Irish are British. It's the English they don't like.
The Catholic Irish are still angry about historical events involving people like Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange. I saw someone at a demonstration in the 1970s waving a banner saying "remember the Battle of the Boyne." That happened in 1690 ffs. Without religion, people forget these historical conflicts. Religion can keep hatred festering for centuries.
The Abrahamic laws and customs detailed in the Bible are very similar to those of the Hurrians … who occupied the area where Abraham is supposed to have lived before he went to Egypt.
The word Zion (Tsion) may be the Hurrian name for the Night Sky (The Milky Way … the "source of spiritual knowledge")
@SeniorCitizen007 Interesting! The Hurrians are new to me, so Googling has been pretty fascinating. I'd love to read more. Thanks for the info!
I'm really confused. I know that many Jews' families keep very detailed lineages as it was important to know things like who is a Kohanim and who is a Levite. They did so because of their different roles within the Temple. Temple 1 and 2 are fact, aren't they? I know there's no god involved in that, but I don't doubt but what the temples existed. I have been regarding Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Noah and the rest as having lived and that there are elements of their stories that are true, but that any supernatural was obviously not supernatural and that the stories have evolved over time like legends do. Why should we doubt that they existed altogether?
I understand you are still struggling Dragonfly, so don't take this too harshly:
Do you think Hercules was a real person? How about Utnapishtim?
If your answer is no; I suggest some reflection on why you think they are fiction, but think that Noah, Moses, and Abraham's running crew are not?
@Nyarlathotep Well, Hercules was a god, so no, I don't think he was a real person. I'm unfamiliar with Utnapishtim. I do think that many stories in the Bible are from events that had some speck of truth to them but were changed (often drastically) over time. I don't know any modern-day followers of Hercules or lineages that date back to those times.
But yes, I am doing a lot of reflection and gathering of info. It feels like an overwhelming task.
It seems to me like you are creating special exceptions to preserve the last tidbits of your 50 year adventure with Christianity.
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BTW: The fictional character Noah is the Jewish/Christian reboot of the fictional character Utnapishtim.
Do you think Samson was real; the Jewish/Christian reboot of Hercules?
@ Dragonfly
Utnapishtim is the Akkadian translation for the name Ziusudra. Ziusudra is the "Noah" figure in the "Epic of Ziusudra." The "Epic of Zusudra" is the second re-telling of the "flood story" in the "Epic of the Genesis of Eridu." The Eridu and Ziusudra epics actually seem to describe a cataclysmic and catastrophic flood event on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flood plain about 2900 BCE.
The Genesis of Eridu was written circa 2000 BCE. The Epic of Ziusudra about 1900 BCE.
I wrote a short essay about the Noahacian Flood Story.
Still doing research into the flood story, even after 30+ years of research, but I still cannot find any other evidence for any other flood event that could have been plagiarized by the Hebrews for their book of plagiarized faerie tales. But, I still keep looking.
rmfr
Dragonfly, nothing, absolutely nothing is first-hand accounts by eye-witnesses. At best the stories in the bible are hearsay, verbal folk-tales, and fictional stuff.
The Exodus is certainly an act of fiction. The Jewish tribes that served as mercenaries for the Egyptians spent forty years consolidating their numbers before they moved on and conquered territory. It was during this period when all the tales arose, the tales that today are the foundation of the Jewish heritage.
@Dragonfly
Hi. I'm not a qualified historian, I'm worse, I'm a history tragic and I offer the following to ease your confusion.
Temple One and Two are, as I understand, Solomon's Temple and Herod's Temple. I believe both were real and both were destroyed by foreign forces. Solomon's temple was destroyed by the Babylonians when they captured Jerusalem about 587 BCE. Excavations by Tel Aviv University have uncovered what is beleived to be the original foundations of his temple.
After being freed from bondage in Babylon the returning Israelites built a new modest temple which was later remodelled by Herod I (Herod the Great). The Romans destroyed the second temple in 70CE in response to a continuing Jewish revolt which also led to the great diaspora.
As for specific characters in the old testament, which many credible sources believe was written and compiled around and well after 750 BCE, Adam, Eve, the Tower of Babel, the Flood and Noah were derived from much older Mesopotamian and Summerian mythologies. Noah appears in the Summerian tale, The Epic of Gilgamesh which dates back to 2100 BC. He is called Utnapishtim and lives with his wife on the ark and plays an important role in helping Gilgamesh find the "plant of immortality".
Abraham, Sarah, Lot, Hagar, Ischmael, Isaac, Easau, Jacob and Rachel and all his other 'wives' and all his children, the children of Israel (formerly known as Jacob), Moses, Aaron, Miriam, the Exodus and Joshua and the battles for the land of Canaan, are all considered mythologies or legends. At best they may have been loosely based on actual people.
The Kings of Canaan, Saul, David, Solomon and then the various kings of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, bring actual history into the old testament. A plaster shard bearing a loosely translated account of a victory of an Assyrian(?) warlord over the 'house of David' is the only other documented evidence about King David. Psalms, Proverbs and the Song of Solomon were ascribed to them both but research of language and history, suggests these were written at a much later time, maybe even later than the Babylonian exile.
It can get pretty confusing trying to unravel all this history of the bible. Actual critical analysis of it was only really possible after it was published in venacular languages , English, French, German and broadcast with the printing press which all happened around about the 1500s. And at every stage the Catholic and Episcoplian Churches were there to oppose the spreading of the word, which is somewhat ironic. That opposition continues today.
Ironically the most honest historical discoveries and assessments about the historicity of the old testament comes from Israel's national university of Tel Aviv, who were unequivocal that no evidence could be found in the Sinai to support the Exodus ever happened, or that any battles were ever fought to secure Canaan for the Israelites. The latest view is that the kingdom of King Saul came about by the increase of populations in the area, beginning before and around 1200BC, by a variety of peoples who eventually bonded, developed and shared a common culture. It is suggested one of the earliest and numerous groups were a people called the Habiru, which became the Hebrew.
I can recommend a few books, some you mght find available in pdf free online.
A History of God by Karen Armstrong, which follows the development of the idea of god from the Greek, Hebrew, Christian, Islamic and Eastern perspectives.
Occidental Mythology by Joseph Campbell which examines the mythologies from earliest civilisations through to the Abrahamic religions.
For more info and reading here are the first three chapters of Richard Eliott's Who Wrote the Bible, well worth reading and might answer a lot of your questions:
.
https://biblebrisket.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/first-3-chapters-of-who...
Youtube vids of an entire Yale university course lectures of the New Testament:
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL389844840243140C
And a similar Yale lecture course of the Old Testament:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=christine+hayes+old+testament
That should keep you busy for awhile. I'm still rereading and rewatching them myself.
Cheers.
@Grinseed Thank you for all of this detailed info. Did you know all of this off the top of your head, or is there a source you went to that you can recommend? You are quite the historian! You've given me a lot of info to study and think about--thank you.
I did read Armstrong's A History of God, although I need to read it again, apparently. The Epic of Gilgamesh would make for some fascinating reading, I'm sure.
One of the challenges I'm having in sorting through all of my questions is that I don't have enough hours in the day to study history, mythology, science and comparative religion and then go back to the sources they cited in order to research those. I don't have a great memory (have a neurocognitive disorder that affects memory), so I need to keep detailed notes of the things I'm learning in order to refer to them and conclusions I've already come to. Do you have any recommendations on how to tackle these issues?
It sounds like you have already have a fine appraoch for studying these huge subjects, science, history, religion.
It is what most curious people in history have done, take notes, cross reference them, make more notes, try to keep it all in the head. This method doesnt always work efficiently for soft tissued carbon based brains as we have.
We are forced to rely on 'somatic' information like notes, books, libraries and most fortunately, computers, which ironically have increased the load of information available to us.
Tips from an amateur history student? I think you already know as much as I do. History is sequential, "one damn thing after another". Learn what happened, then why it happened and identify the sequence that creates a particular chain of events. It makes for easier recall...and sounds tritely stupid when I type it out.
I don't have much time to use the internet, except for some weekends, so I keep a notepad ready on my desktop. Its quicker than opening a word document for taking notes, pasting things, etc. I have several notepads available for certain subjects that i can refer to and to enlarge in documents.
And most importantly, for history, keep a folder of maps! War maps, street directories anything that gives you an overview of the place at the time, you are studying.
Oh and check out old posts from Old Man concerning history he has a wealth of info worth reading.
I recognise I will never learn it all and certainly will never remember or understand it all or that I will ever have the hours in a day to do so, so I am never in a rush, I pace myself. I follow where my curiosity leads me. Currently I am reading a lot of religious, mythical, and biblical history, mainly because of what i read here at AR. At some point I might suddenly switch to WW1 Flanders battles of 1916, then to biographies of Jose Rizail of the Philippines...etc though I generally drift back to religious topics which comprise an important part of human history all over the world. I would make a bad student, but then I study out of pure interest, not to pass exams.
So I would generally advise, enjoy yourself, take your time...although I know there will be occasions where you will be desperate to know some small fiddly, but important, bit of information that seems to dangle just outside your reach...the search is the fun part.
Jaws VS Muslims. I am rooting for JAWS.