Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edpolyan
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 12:37:09 CDT
              <EDPOLYAN@ASUACAD.BITNET>
From:         stan kulikowski ii <STANKULI@UWF.BITNET>
Subject:      spiritual education and history

  i was wondering if anyone would even notice the nonhistorical claims
of spiritual literature.

>>
>>  From:         Jack Letarte <JCLETARTE@TAYLORU.BITNET>
>>
>>          Lastly, I really was astonished by Stan's posting on history.
>>  I've just come back from the library, and sure enough, I'm *not* a
>>  modern Rip Van Winkle.  The history books are still there, by reput-
>>  able authors and publishers, and the more modern among those which
>>  relate to Jewish history refer to the latest archeological findings.
>>

  the problem with religious histories is that they take canonical text as
apriori true and then try to apply any physical evidence to that structure. i
am sure the libraries are full of it.   show us text from around 1000 BC with
the name of king david ben jesse in it.  the book of samuel appears 25
generations after this time and is copied thereafter.

  old testament activities begin to agree with independent (nonbiblical
sources) historical data after the time of the babylonian exile.  before then
there is one copper scroll with a verse inscribed which is also found in the
book of numbers.  around 1200 BC there is an egyptian stella near geza which
mentions a 'tribe of isreal' in caana, but during that century they should
have been slaves in egypt according exodus.  that is about the extent of
historical data supporting old testament before the time of jeremiah.

  i did not just make this up.  go read the history net where the
professional historians gather (HISTORY@rutvm1.bitnet).  i suggest you might
download the listserv's archive for october 1991 and search the Subject:
lines for the following titles:

      Origins which are not 'Jewish'                   9 Oct 91 03:12
      Question of origins of peoples and religions     9 Oct 91 16.35

  there are a couple other messages around that vicinity on related topics.
you will be encountering a discription of how macrolineages are formed in
ethnographic records.  i can email you the relevant files if you cannot handle
the archive search.

  for something to be considered historical data, you need to have written
records from the time period being described.  good historical data comes
from more than one source, particularly from opposing viewpoints and
interests.  there are historical records for the palestinian area all through
biblical times, but they were not written by jewish peoples.  archeological
findings would be acceptable in the absense of written records, but these
would still have to identify people like 'saul', 'david,' 'solomon', 'moses',
and 'abraham' without writing.  or we might accept tangeable remains like
noah's arc or the campsites of 600,000 slaves who walked out of egypt and
wandered 40 years in sinai.  these things just are not found even though that
area of the world has been the most thoroughly examined area by archeologists
and historians who really wanted to find that evidence.  do you think the
egyptian accountants would have missed half a million slaves who walked off
the job and an entire army of chariots being destroyed in the red sea?

  when the persian king, cyrus the great, conquered babylon (539 BC) and
released the captives taken from caana, they returned to jerusalem, literate
and calling themselves 'jews', and they had developed monotheism by the waters
of babylon.  if you feel the historians on HISTORY@rutvm1.bitnet are somehow
biased, last summer the learning channel ran a video series called 'summer
digs' and virtually the same information was presented there.  the main
historian, a guy named romer (i believe), is a christian and took as generous
a viewpoint as possible, but even he had to mention the lack of historical
evidence for any king named david.


>>
>>  I place the assertion that we don't have evidence of the existence
>>  of David and Solomon right alongside the new teaching that the
>>  holocaust did not take place.
>>

  quite the opposite.  i can show you historical documents of nazi holocaust.
we can go to the sites described and dig up tangeable evidence of those
activities.  and we can do this for old testament materials after jeremiah, but
not before.   any revisionist history here happened in the 5th c BC, when the
pentateuch first appeared as historical documents.  contemporaneous documents
before the 5th c exist but do not support the activities and persons
represented.


>>  ...  There
>>  are always things we don't understand, but we shouldn't discard or
>>  ignore history for that reason
>>

  no one suggests that we discard history.  just take the blinders off when
viewing ancient text.  much of the middle ages would be impossible to
understand without reference to bible culture of the times.  personally, i
enjoy the bible stories as moral tales and would feel a loss if they were
abandoned as useless just because they were originally developed to explain
monotheism, not as accurate historical records.

  that is a problem with spiritual education.  the apriori 'revealed truth'
prevents one so-trained from looking very closely at the origins of the very
text which is adopted a canonical.  ancient texts are full of descriptions
of spirits which are contradictory to the ones you want examined in depth.
let the spirits stand on their own direct evidence.  you cannot cite history
in a fair even-handed manner.
                             stan

    .                  stankuli@UWF.bitnet
   ===
         when a thraskin puts fingers in its ears, it is polite to shout
   ---                                          -- old venusian proverb
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