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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[origamiscienceguy]

Alright. What are the correlations with Gilgamesh, then?

I'd say a lot of the reason why people widespread believe in one and not the other is because a large portion of the bible is aimed at laying down a moral code and a codified way of life.

That's how the old testament was. However, nobody could ever keep all the laws, so as time went by, the only solution seemed to be MOAR LAWS! Then Jesus came and told everybody that the reason God gave them the law was to prove that they needed a savior because they all couldn't keep the law.

[Orange Wizard]

In a lot of ways the study of memes and religions is very similar to that of evolution, funnily enough. Those religions that are best at "spreading" through converts, are good at "surviving" by keeping those that join them present in the religion, and are good at "evolving" by having flexible enough moral codes to allow them to change over time to fit modern values are going to be those that survive the best in a given area, just as how the organisms that are best at spreading, surviving, and evolving are going to be the most widespread ones in biology.

Christianity is pretty fascinating in that regard. The OT's moral code is anything but flexible, but people still find ways to wiggle it like a pen to make it appear flexible.

something like the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, which has absolutely no physical supporting evidence, is lacking from a historical point of view.

Didn't someone find a copper sword or something in the Red Sea? Pretty sure that counts as evidence.

[Graknorke]

Didn't someone find a copper sword or something in the Red Sea? Pretty sure that counts as evidence.

...does it? It's not as though swords were particularly rare, and neither would they be too easy to find the origin of nowadays.

[redwallzyl]

Didn't someone find a copper sword or something in the Red Sea? Pretty sure that counts as evidence.

...does it? It's not as though swords were particularly rare, and neither would they be too easy to find the origin of nowadays.

speaking as a marine archaeologist in training that could have gotten their about a million different ways and have gotten there anywhere from old kingdom Egypt to Ptolemaic Egypt or beyond. the red sea was a major trade corridor and i could imagine may different scenarios for that i would believe before the bible story and I'm a christian! best way to determine age would probably be measuring concretion or comparing styles with already dated examples. a sample of copper could be traced to mines in Sinai or other copper producing regions. that kind of stuff is well documented.

did i ramble a bit? sorry. i like this kind of stuff a lot.

[Flying Dice]

Didn't someone find a copper sword or something in the Red Sea? Pretty sure that counts as evidence.

...does it? It's not as though swords were particularly rare, and neither would they be too easy to find the origin of nowadays.

speaking as a marine archaeologist in training that could have gotten their about a million different ways and have gotten there anywhere from old kingdom Egypt to Ptolemaic Egypt or beyond. the red sea was a major trade corridor and i could imagine may different scenarios for that i would believe before the bible story and I'm a christian! best way to determine age would probably be measuring concretion or comparing styles with already dated examples. a sample of copper could be traced to mines in Sinai or other copper producing regions. that kind of stuff is well documented.

did i ramble a bit? sorry. i like this kind of stuff a lot.

Nah, being passionate about your field is a good thing.

[Rose]

I'd say it's a failed attempt at a sea-going Joan of Arc

[i2amroy]

something like the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, which has absolutely no physical supporting evidence, is lacking from a historical point of view.

Didn't someone find a copper sword or something in the Red Sea? Pretty sure that counts as evidence.

Yay, quote time!

After more than a century of research and the massive efforts of generations of archaeologists and Egyptologists, nothing has been recovered that relates directly to the account in Exodus of an Egyptian sojourn and escape or of a large-scale migration through Sinai.

There was not so much as a potshard from the 13th-12th centuries B.C., the time frame required, as we have seen, for the Exodus.

The Israelites never were in Egypt. They never came from abroad. This whole chain is broken. It is not a historical one. It is a later legendary reconstruction—made in the seventh century [BCE]—of a history that never happened.

Modern archaeology pretty much agrees that the Israelites never had Egyptian origins, but instead arose from the local areas of Canaan. In fact, if you look at the archaeological evidence of the earliest of Israelite settlements, their cult objects are of the Canaanite god, their pottery is made in the local Canaanite way, and their early alphabet very closely matches the early Canaanite one. They are so much alike, in fact, that really the only outlier is that the Israelite encampments are pig bone free, while the early Canaanite ones are not.

This also lines up with the fact that whole tale of Exodus is chock full of anachronisms. There are tons of mentions of places that never existed, places that were only occupied later, places that were occupied by the Egyptians instead of the Israelites but were ruins by the time much of the bible was being written, and so forth. To put it bluntly, the Exodus never happened, and it so much never happened that even the modern Israelite scientists who have made their careers looking into it are agreeing that it never happened.

[Reelya]

The best bet for any Egyptian link is the Hyksos era. Locations and some details match pretty well, they were semites from the canaan area originally, and when they got booted out a century later, they clearly went somewhere (back to canaan makes sense). Hyksos weren't really any one ethnicity, they were a mix of semitic groups. So it's pretty likely that such groups retreating from Egypt mixed in with the local canaanite population later and might have given rise to some myths and legends surrounding the period.

There are a bunch of parallels to the bible.

For example, the Hyksos capital of Avaris happens to be directly in the center of the "land of goshen" where Joseph supposedly settled the israelites. This could possibly relate to Hyksos leaders inviting in fellow canaanites as additional settlers during the Hyksos period. Such resettlement is well-established historic fact of the period: the Hyksos didn't all come at once, they conquered cities, gradually expanded and a steady flow of settlers from the canaan region joined them.

 Also if you read about Josephs actions in Egypt, it amounts to (in black and white unambiguous terms) (1) hoard all the food (2) starve the people to get them to cough up all their gold (3) appopriate all the cattle (4) herd the native population into cities thus depriving them of productive land (5) give the left over land to settlers from your home country. It's plausible because that's precisely how colonialist invasions work in practice. It sounds like a verbatim description of what's happened in Gaza, the Boer War, or the Vietnam War. So, my money is on the fact that there's a grain of truth in exodus, but it's putting a positive spin on the 17th century BC when canaanites invaded Egypt and enslaved everyone, then tried to control them by removing them from the farmland.

Also, I think it's in Genesis 39 "Thus he left all that he had in Joseph's hand, and he did not know what he had except for the bread which he ate." basically, it's saying the Pharaoh lost all control of the country, but still existed as a figurehead. "Puppet emperor under house arrest" is what that sounds like to me (think Pizarro and emperor Atahualpa, who was also seen as a living God, and who's capture thus forced servitude from the natives). The whole thing reads like a "how to subjugate other countries" manual. Perhaps the stories were educational back in a barbaric time of how to invade people. And the last act listed by the Israelites was looting all the gold and silver from the remaining citizens before they fled. Of course this was "magical god-powered looting", like we believe that. So it doesn't count under "thou shalt not steal". lol. But it does sound plausible if an uprising is forcing your people out of the conquered country that the last thing you do is mass looting. It's plausible because that's exactly what would happen in that situation.

[germanyfrance]

So I was watching a friend play binding of Issac on the DS. And he said that it was based off of a story of Abraham and Issac in the bible. If the game is anything close to the real story, than Abraham is a terrible father. Is the game leaving out important details or something?

[Graknorke]

Well it's not really much of a basis, but yes Abraham was a terrible father.

[Arx]

I wouldn't base any opinions on anything off a game, but Abraham was pretty bad as fathers go. Or pretty nutty - he really loved Isaac (or at least the potential Isaac represented).

[Adragis]

-Badly worded and flimsy summary-

[origamiscienceguy]

So I was watching a friend play binding of Issac on the DS. And he said that it was based off of a story of Abraham and Issac in the bible. If the game is anything close to the real story, than Abraham is a terrible father. Is the game leaving out important details or something?

The game does leave out several details that make the story make more sense. (i've only really seen the intro cutscene, but I think that is what you are referring to) When taken out of context, Abraham looks like a terrible father, but you have to look at the entire story.

God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great many people. And that they would come through Issac.
Genesis 15:5 He [God] took him [Abram] outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars--if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be."

Genesis 17:5 No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.”

Abraham had faith that God would keep his promise to have many descendants through Issac. Which could obviously not happen if Issac was dead. So when God commanded Abraham to: "Take your son, your only son, Issac, whom you love, and...Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering.." Abraham came to the conclusion that God would Raise Issac back from the dead.

Hebrews 11:19 Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.

So Abraham was going to go through with the sacrifice because he believed that God would raise him back from the dead. Instead, God gave a Ram to be sacrificed instead. You are probably asking why God did this if he already knew what was going to happen. The reason is that God was pointing to another event where someone would give his son, his only son, whom he loved. Jesus.

[Cthulhu]

That's not the impression I got from the story and it really undermines the apparent moral of it.

That sounds more like a Pascal's Wager kind of thing which reduces God to a counting machine and removes his agency and ability to tell between a moral person and somebody pulling shenanigans.  Having a post hoc justification in Hebrews doesn't really improve it in my eyes.

[Adragis]

If you're talking about my post there, yeah, that does sound kinda like that on second thoughts and isn't what I intended at all.