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Mass Revelation

This argument was actually the last holdout for me on my journey towards atheism. On its surface it appears rock solid, but with a broader understanding of history it is clearly bogus. I am bothered how this argument continues to make its rounds in Orthodox circles and it is the duty of truthful Jews to shut it down. Claim The written/oral Torah relays the claim that the entire people of Israel witnessed God giving the ten commandments. Such a claim could have never been started. If the claim was started at the time or shortly after the time when such event supposedly happened, the false ‘prophet’ relaying such a claim would not be believed because the events would be easily verifiable. Not only did the supposed event just occur, but anyone being lied to would have easy access to others who supposedly witnessed it (everyone was there). If the mass revelation claim was falsely created many generations after the supposed event, the figure who introduced the claim would be recorded a...

Errors in Tanach

Tanach is full of what seem to be errors. Not something you would expect from a divine document. I urge you to approach these errors with the perspective of someone trying to answer the question, is this a divine text? If you come to the text with the assumption it is divine, you can obviously never conclude that it is not. Parallel Narratives Combined Into One One of the modern secular theories of the Tanach is that it was either composed of multiple source texts or was supplemented with addendums over time to create the patchwork text we have currently. I am going to quote some passages that make sense if they were: originally multiple source texts that were spliced together edited over time written by an author who was happy to take artistic license but are both confusing/convoluted or completely contradictory if thought of as a single source text presenting the literal truth. Yosef sold to slavery Bereshit 37 25 And they sat down to eat bread; and they lifte...

Miraculous Survival of the Jewish People

This is another informal proof to the divinity of the Jewish people. Claim The historical survival of the Jewish people can only be explained by divine intervention. Nations under the following conditions: Persecuted Spread across the world Exiled from their home land are expected to die out. How did the Jewish people survive under these fatal conditions? Counter-Argument There are three ways to counter this argument: Ignorance fallacy Proposed alternative mechanisms of survival Counter-examples Ignorance fallacy Effectively, the claim poses an unexplained scenario along with a hypothesis and suggests that if no explanation is given, the hypothesis is correct. This fallacy is sufficient to dismiss the claim. On a related note, I have not come across anyone who pushes the claim with examples of nations/religions that did fail under stated conditions. Without establishing a trend or bringing evidence, the claim is suggesting that these conditions are fatal with nothing but an ...