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Originally Posted by Shirina
Which was - and is - COMPLETELY unfair.
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It is not unfair because it takes you to a completely new level of thinking, thinking outside the box, and makes you multi-dimensional.
The x-tians claim their commandments came from their god-thing except they didn't. They came from the Egyptians. More than a 1,000 years later, the x-tian god-thing says the first commandment ought to be love your neighbor as you love yourself.
The x-tian god-thing was wrong, and quite very fallible. That is something you can beat down on x-tians.
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Originally Posted by Shirina
It's the same unearned respect that religion has claimed for thousands of years - that religion must be approached with reverence and respect.
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That is called dogma, which is something you can point out, and it is also a logical fallacy, namely, the "Ought/Is" fallacy that religion ought to be respected.
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Originally Posted by Shirina
Most are Christian, some are Hindu, we used to have at least one Muslim - but the vast majority believe in the Palestinian wargod called Yahweh. His full name is Yahweh Teva-ʿot which actually means "He who brings the host" or in more modern terminology, "He who musters armies."
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Ugarit, actually.
Sumer was the first country and it had a pantheon of 12 deities (11 men and one woman). By cultural diffusion it spread to the Akkadians, Gutians, Su****es, Elamites, Mari, Nuzi, Mitani, Eblaites, Amorites, Elamites, Hurrians, Hittites, Canaanites, Hebrews, etc.
Like everyone else, the Hebrews were polytheists before becoming henotheists and finally monolatrists.
There never was an Exodus. The Hebrews always lived in Canaan, and more importantly, the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh bordered Ugarit to the north and the Philistines to the west.
Classical Biblical Hebrew is the Ugaritic dialect of Canaanite without the case endings. That could only happen if the Hebrews always lived next to Ugarit for centuries, since Ugarit was overrun and destroyed, it's people killed, carted off as slaves or fled and never returned, and you can't learn a language from people who no longer exist.
Abandoning cities/towns/villages was commonplace. All the cities in Sumer were abandoned
en masse at once and were never inhabited again. Later, most of the cities in Akkad were permanently abandoned.
One of your duties as an Atheist is to point out and correct the many misunderstandings of x-tians.
Anyway, Yahweh was part of the Ugarit pantheon (but not the Philistines' pantheon) which consisted of El (or Bull-El if you prefer), Ba'al, El Elyon, El Berith, El Shaddai, Yam, Mot, the female Asherah, Dagon, Kothar, Lothan, and Yahweh.
Yam was the "sea god" hence
Yam Suf (the sea of reeds).
Mot was the god of death, hence the word
mot in CBH means death.
Etymology is a beautiful thing. You can trace the etymology of Philistine to Palestine simply by looking at maps from later Greek/early Roman times, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, all the way to the present.
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Originally Posted by Shirina
This is why, throughout the Old Testament, God is rampaging across the so-called Promised Land committing genocide against one innocent city-state after another. Over two dozen named cities were wiped out down to every man, woman, and child - and sometimes even animals.
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That never happened. Archeology proves it.
Regardless of the date you assign to the Exodus-that-never-happened Jericho was not inhabited, and worse, there's no evidence of damage to the walls around the town, or that any conflict took place in the town.
If you read journals like the
Journal of the Ancient Near East you'll know it is virtually impossible to tell the difference between the Canaanites and the Hebrews. It's like trying to tell the difference between Americans and Canadians.
You're digging in a village or town, how do you know it was occupied by Canaanites or Hebrews? Unless you pig bones which means they were eating pork, you really can't tell the difference.
Of the 16 cities claimed to have been destroyed during the Exodus, 10 of those cities have been discovered.
Seven of those cities show no evidence of destruction or conflict, and worse than that, three of the cities (Gibeon, Jericho and Ai) weren't even occupied during the Exodus, as they had been abandoned for a century or more.
Of the three that were destroyed, two of them were proven to have been destroyed by "sea peoples."
Of the last city, it's unclear if it was destroyed by Hebrews or Canaanites, since it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the two cultures.
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Originally Posted by Shirina
Yahweh was a god of war - and certainly not the "peaceful" and "loving" and "forgiving" and "fair" God they want him to be. As I've said before - it is the biggest and worst example of cognitive dissonance ever foisted onto humanity.
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Of that there can be no doubt.
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