I agree Islam is not a doctrine compatible with the west, it has not gone through the change it needs to become so ....

but one for Moses is the Golden Calf story when he comes down from Mt Sinai. Exodus 32:27.

Quote:


Funnily enough Moses did not take his own words to heart and kill Aaron who instigated the Golden Calf idol.

Setanta wrote on Dec 18^th, 2017 at 10:20pm:


Are you saying that nature never cleans up the refuse?

Also, if nothing is found, does that not merely tell you that the city did not exist in the place you looked, or did exist but the conditions were not suitable for preservation of the artifacts? How do you go from there to saying that the city never existed at all? I would expect that what passed for a city thousands of years ago would be a small town by today's standards.

This is not grasping at straws. I am pointing out a fundamental logical fallacy. You don't get to turn logic on its head just because you are an archeologist and you cannot go and dig wherever you want. This is no less silly than claiming that evolution tells us that missing links do not exist.

There is zero evidence that any of these locations were simply invented by the author of the book of Exodus.  Secular scholars, including University of Tel Aviv archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, agree on this issue.  The problem is, that many of these cities and forts did not exist during the time period that the Biblical account asserts!
https://lutherwasnotbornagaincom.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/the-cities-mentioned-i...

However, the archeological conclusions are not based primarily on the absence of Sinai evidence. Rather, they are based upon the study of settlement patterns in Israel itself. Surveys of ancient settlements--pottery remains and so forth--make it clear that there simply was no great influx of people around the time of the Exodus (given variously as between 1500-1200 BCE). Therefore, not the wandering, but the arrival alerts us to the fact that the biblical Exodus is not a literal depiction. In Israel at that time, there was no sudden change in the kind or the volume of pottery being made. (If people suddenly arrived after hundreds of years in Egypt, their cups and dishes would look very different from native Canaanites'.) There was no population explosion. Most archeologists conclude that the Israelites lived largely in Canaan over generations, instead of leaving and then immigrating back to Canaan.
http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/judaism/2004/12/did-the-exodus-really-happen.asp...

Most towns and cities are on a riverbank. Riverbanks move. They don't always bury evidence of civilisation in layer upon layer of mud. Sometimes they sweep the whole thing out to sea. Where do you think beach sand comes from?

Setanta wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2017 at 7:43pm:


Even the driest deserts get flooded occasionally. In fact it tends to cause more erosion there, on account of the lack of vegetation.

I'm actually be interested if FD elaborated on his rather extraordinary claim that the existence of Israel is evidence of an exodus. FD?

Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog wrote in the Haaretz newspaper:

This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.[29][30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_archaeology