I don’t think it is, in fact I think it’s pretty far from moot. The reason we have these extremists in all faiths is because they believe quite literally these people existed and existed as described.

Precisely Leon ( perhaps you didn’t understand my thrust) my point was precisely it’s about people belief whether they existed in history, regardless or not whether a historian would agree or not/provide enough proofs, (obviously all history is open for questioning) Its the mythology that counts. If you believe in something so strongly, because its a story you have heard from your ancestors, you’re not really going to bother too much about history vs. folklore.

“Met them have ‘we’?”

No, but there is pagan Roman evidence for the existance of Jesus, and Muhammad’s existance is pretty much a certainty. As for the likes of David and Moses, those are harder to prove, but as has been pointed out, they probably were real people who might have had their exploits embelleshed at a later stage.

I think JFF’s point that ‘‘texts’ are the root problem’ has a little more to it than you address. The texts in question are held as being divinely sanctioned/dictated, which places them in a different category to bodies of law, constitutions or The Origin of Species.

only in respect of the argument from authority. if you don’t respect the Source, you are unlikely to respect laws which rely on this Source rather than on a ethical-rational deductive basis, which can be universally derived. an example would be the Torah requirement of circumcision, or the separation of meat and milk products, or not eating pigs. it only makes sense within the context, as both are hard to find rational justifications for, although some people can’t bear not to try. however, the problem with giving reasons for these sorts of laws is that the reason you give would have to be able to stand up. the moment that you prove that eating pork isn’t actually bad for you, which it manifestly isn’t as far as i’m concerned, the reason to keep the Law disappears. there are different categories of law within Torah and, as far as i’m concerned, it is the ethical and moral ones that we are concerned with here. there is also the matter of the Torah principle of “the law of the land is the law”, which means that if something’s illegal in the UK, it’s therefore illegal under Torah law for jews living in the UK.

A law which has become so out-moded that it is anomalous can be discarded without anyone feeling the need to elaborately interpret it. Compulsory archery practice for every male on Sunday? No need to agonise over what it can be taken to mean in such and such a context – it’s out-moded so dump it.

for me, this contains some rather glaring assumptions. you may not be aware of this, but there are several laws in the Torah that have been declared not “out-moded”, but rather effectively inapplicable. the law to “exterminate ‘amalek” is a good example. we can no longer identify an amalekite with certainty (according to the sages, since sennacherib mixed up the nations during his rule) so this law cannot be observed. this does not mean the law is “out-moded”, but rather that it can’t be observed. in either case the effect is the same. in your archery example, rather than saying something was “out-moded”, we’d assume that the law was there to teach us something different if it was no longer able to be literally carried out. there are, as you may know, very often laws in Torah that appear to be mutually contradictory. in such cases, the Oral Law exists to reconcile the differences or explain how they apply to different cases. in cases where the sages felt a Torah law to be inappropriate for their contemporary context, they found ways to prevent its literal application. thus, you can get the death penalty under Torah law for virtually anything from gathering sticks on saturday to idolatry or murder, but the sages introduced, in the interests of justice and equity, so many checks and balances on the application of this penalty, that it was for all intents and purposes impossible to secure a conviction in the case of a capital crime, therefore lesser penalties were deduced. in the case of the famous “eye for an eye”, they simply asked what happened if a blind man pokes your ey out, obviously you can’t take his eye in retribution, therefore they concluded that the law implied a system of financial compensation. this is a world away from saying “oh, it’s out-moded” and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Constitutions are designed with the need for future ammendments in mind, and no scientist has an emotional attachment to conclusions that subsequent knowledge has over-turned.

and the more one learns about Torah, the more you will understand how the oral tradition that goes with it allows for precisely this process without violating the need for criticism and open-minded intellectual inquiry. however, you will be unaware of this if you are not aware of how the texts *actually function in practice*. therefore, something may look “self-evidently vile” to you, but in actual fact, the truth may be very different.

Divinely sanctioned texts allow the text-masters to over-ride clear human injustices by appealing to the supreme being, the ultimate trump card.

that’s quite simply not how it works in judaism. if we believe that G!D commands us “justice, justice you must pursue”, then that Torah text can be brought to address ANY clear injustice; thus we appeal to the authority we have already been granted. if we don’t pursue that justice then we cannot blame anyone else but ourselves. we cannot evade responsibility for our own actions.

@jff:

You know full well that the whole philosophy of science is based on the publishing of a hypothesis and then it is either ridiculed or accepted by fellow scientists. So is eugenics a hypothesis that has wings?- I leave that to a geneticist to comment on.

right, so in the same way as far, as i am concerned, an interpretation of a piece of Text is subject to extremely rigorous peer-group review before a given hypothesis can be accepted as having wings or not. that is precisely what the Talmudic process is – an ongoing debate about what stuff means, examined from every possible angle.

What is your basis for that claim [that parents are not necessarily reliable]? Or is it just a hope?

it is empirically observable in the parenting of people i know and goodness knows there are enough horror stories about parents who should know better. as for statistical validation, i would assume that the majority of parents can be trusted, but there’s enough of a significant minority for me to distrust categorical claims of parental adequacy.

@leon:

judaism does not dispute the real existence of either jesus or muhammad, although we would question the divinity, parentage and interpretation of the former and the universal claims of the latter.

b’shalom

bananabrain

Justforfun

“The reason we have these extremists in all faiths is because they believe quite literally these people existed and existed as described.

I think you are oversimplifying things. Besides the obvious point that History is able to confirm the existence of many figures long past gone, the majority of Christians, Muslims, Budhists – who believe in the existence of their founders and some narrative of how they lived – are decent folk. I mean, it is not like communism or nazism – both atheist ideologies – didn’t go into any extremes…

for me whether mo, jesus, or whoever existed or not in the flesh as we are told they did, is a moot point.

I don’t think it is, in fact I think it’s pretty far from moot. The reason we have these extremists in all faiths is because they believe quite literally these people existed and existed as described.

for me whether mo, jesus, or whoever existed or not in the flesh as we are told they did, is a moot point. the fact that there’s a myth/caricature of a man/ that enough people believed in over the centuries,to have come from ‘God’ – is the key thing here. as long as people have believed it, it effectively doesnt really matter whether the fairy in the sky who likes talking to middle-eastern blokes, did talk to those particular blokes who said they heard the fairy. (!)

chinese whispers in the desert -who can say now what they were all about. the problem is that its still impacting laws today in a good-ish part of the world.

I only noticed the url after I posted it. Still the arguement seems to stand up.

Yup. There is indeed a lot of doubt, at least about the existence of Jesus Christ:

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/marshall_gauvin/did_jesus_really_live.html

We know that they existed.

Met them have ‘we’?

There may well have been living individuals who became the focus of tales that turned them into Robin Hood or King Arthur, that doesn’t make the icons we now have ‘real’.

Anyone read ‘The Book of Dave’?

“You talk as if these ‘people’ are real…”

Er, they are real. We know that they existed. Their connections to God on the other hand is the debatable point.

Exactly. According to the Torah which, despite Islamic propaganda, remains uncorrupted (they have a real scholarship tradition in retaining Torah scrolls), the Messiah would be a DIRECT descendent of David – a Hebrew, not an Arab. Both Jesus and Mo fail, but more so Mo. At least Jesus was a Jew. Mo was a Pagan by birth.

You talk as if these ‘people’ are real…