I think if left to their own devices, they will either A: Invent a new pseudo-christianity, or B: Convert to Islam en masse, since it more closely aligns with their values.

There's a reason education upsets them so badly, especially higher education. The ability to think critically undermines their authority.

Idiocy

Anti-Nowhere League- "My God's Bigger Than Your God". If you're up for some post-80s punk.

It's actually a place where the KJV is more accurate as surprising as that is.

"look, I am sick of this. Let's just have a God measuring contest."

My god's better than your god, my god's better than yours! My god's better 'cause he throws lightning bolts, my god's better than yours!

My god's better than your god because mine can't be defeated with Iron Age weapons.

total bullshit

To be fair, Jewish people often find that concept troubling, too -- any monotheistic religious group would be discomfited by the thought that their sacred scriptures could be describing anything else as possibly real.

@@MM-jf1meI agree that some modern forms of Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, for example, certainly wouldn’t agree with these scholars. Any of the modern forms of monotheistic Judaism, as noted from archeology and the ancient texts themselves, were originally polytheistic; the revisionist history monotheists in Judaism and Christianity propound, ignores massive evidence to the contrary. They ignore evidence of widespread changes to strands of thought and culture circa 2nd century BCE that made that religion what it began to be.

Lets be honest. Jesus thought Moses wrote the Torah, the prophets the other books, that the Exodus happened and that the Father/Yhwh is his God. So if the basics are not right and your leader was wrong, what kind of religion remains?😂 definititely not the faith of Jesus. On top of that our Nt doesn't even go back to Jesus

@@JopJio it’s actually more troublesome than you’ve alluded. We don’t really have Jesus’ words. We have words that anonymous Greek-speaking educated elites CLAIM Jesus said, using a language he wouldn’t have been speaking to his native Jewish audience. What we have are highly-educated Greco-Roman recent converts (to some form of Judaism/proto-Christianity), trying to harmonize their fledgling understanding of Israelite history with the literary devices they learned during their education, which taught them to place certain words in the mouths of the figures they wanted to historicize and lionize.

Is that why they’re upside down?

Thou shalt not laugh. Some prop guys had a lot of fun with the commandments visible (in Hebrew) on the broken tablet.

GOD: ... I should have moved the ones about rape and slavery higher up.

@@huttj509 Do you have details about this?

@@DoloresLehmann History of the World by Mel Brooks

Shout out to Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who loves that translation.

@@hardwork8395 She’s the best!

Came here to mention this

I have heard, I believe on one of Dan's other videos possibly that Beelzebub 'Lord of the Flies' was essentially an insult; the idea being that Beelzebub was literally shit and attracted flies.

@@squiddwizzard8850 Baal basically means "Lord" and zebub alludes to shit and flies. But it was probably Baal zaphon, the Lord of mount zaphon, Baals home in the mythology. So basically a satirical diss. Funny enough Baal and Yahweh are really similar in a lot of ways. No wonder Yahweh worshippers hate Baal su much.

Did the Israelite god have sovereignty in Egypt? God-flex moves.

Indeed! And here's a few verses for any believers who disagree. Exodus 12:12 - ...I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. Exodus 15:11 - Who among the gods is like you, Yahweh? Exodus 18:11 - Now I know that Yahweh is greater than all other gods...

Hand in glove with the ‘chosen people’ conceit.

​@Bible-Christian What is a god?

I grew up JW and that was a major theme of our beliefs. All that non biblical stuff was demonic, demons were the gods of the nations.

​@Bible-Christianyou could lose the word "other" and be just as accurate.

@Bible-ChristianCheck the video you are posting under.

Bob Marley is mine.

​@@welcometonebalia Taxibus, move a buncha people!

I kinda liked The Artist Formally Known As Prince's take on Exodus. Muy funky.

David Wood is great so is CIRA international

Mythvision is also great. They bring in tons of scholars, mostly for Christianity but they've had a fair few for Islam. And there are some really illuminating discoveries in Islamic critical scholarship, like mecca may not have existed at the time of Muhammad, that really threw me for a loop.

Thomas Alexander is also amazing. He goes over the Aramiac roots of the Quran rather than it being Arabic. He talks about the scholarship and dispels myths about Islam, including where many of the stories in the Quran actually come from. He holds that Muhammad may not have existed or that he was a composite character, and he goes over the evidence for this

Gabriel Said Reynolds also has a KZfaq channel called exploring the bible and the quran where he has loads of scholars

They weren't really occupied in that sense. During the collapse of the city-states, the kings wrote to Pharoah asking for help to put down the "Shasu," who were basically starting an insurrection. Pharoah replied that they'd have to deal with it themselves because he was busy dealing with raids down his coast by "the Sea Peoples." The "Shasu" pulled more and more people to their cause and the cities were abandoned, with numerous settlements quickly springing up in the low hill country. This event is the one that was reinvented to describe the settling of Israel after the Conquest of Canaan that didn't actually happen.

Kinda like what the 2 Chronicles guy did.

It's always good seeing Inspiring Philosophy brought down a peg or two

@@stevem7945 Not sure whatever happened in their last tiff. IP put up a post about a big production to refute Dan but I can't find anything. Wondering if there was a truce.

@@scottmaddow7879Me too. I believe Dan was supposed to be releasing a part two to his second refutation of IP, but still nothing

I've yet to meet a "literal bible" believer who will commit to the solid dome in Genesis 1:7. Even Ken Ham doesn't seem to believe in such a thing despite his "Literal reading of Genesis"

​@@MrDalisclockthere are some flat Earthers that do.

@@MrDalisclock Flat earthers are serious about literalism at least where it comes to the dome and the waters above. Take a Canon P900 or P1000 camera and video the stars. Since it can’t autofocus it looks like lights in water. To them that’s proof that the Bible is literally correct about that.

It’s presupposing univocallity, as Dan likes to say

And funnily enough, it only takes a few moments to raise that even if we grant that the Bible says it later-they are only proving, inadvertently, that it didn’t say it when those other people were alive…so they had no clue. That seems like an abject failure on the biblical God’s part, to only inform other people hundreds of years later. So the earlier people would have thought the opposite

To them, stars were points of light in the sky, not the massive bodies we know. Also, "Elohim" is a plural word. "-im" in Hebrew is plural.

Speaking of different gods and saying they are real is not remotely the same thing.

What?

@@chadkent327 What happens to the other gods that we don't worship? Do they die?

@@mickeydecurious Gods are fictional, they don’t exist.

@@mickeydecurious See T. Pratchett et al., Small Gods.

​​@@mickeydecurious Oh, this is funnily one of those instances where modern Eastern ideas have penetrated into Judeo-Christian culture. The idea of gods needing worship to remain in existence is completely alien to the Mediterranean context of what gods are. Gods can die and be reborn, but they will continue to exist eternally. Ra dies at night when his barge goes into the underworld but in the morning he revives. Why? Because he is the literal sun. Ra fading away means the literal sun fading away. As long as there is a sun there is a Ra. This was the way Mediterranean peoples understood their gods - most of whom were tied to physical objects. The idea that gods could fade away if people stopped worshipping them actually came from Japanese Shinto religion. The reason why Japanese people believe this is because their gods are not personifications of physical objects but administrators of them - and they can be "fired" like any other employee. Amaterasu is the goddess of the sun but not the sun itself. She just "runs" the sun. If people stopped worshipping her she could lose her job and fade away - die permanently. This is the way the Japanese perceive their gods and it's a completely radical idea for the West. It entered the Western consciousness in the 19th century but was amplified during the occult craze of the early 20th century. The idea was picked up by writers of fiction like Robert Chambers and reworked by American fantasy writers like Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard. It is now very prevalent in literature. However, it was never anyone's real belief system in the West in the ancient or modern eras. Only the Japanese have this as a real religious belief.

You first have to realize was only the tribal god of the Israelites. Each tribe or nation (in that region and at that time) had their own god(s). Egypt, other Canaanite tribes, Babylon, Greece etc. So your own tribal god was nothing special and they knew about gods of other tribes. Next to that, monotheism wasn't invented yet. Each tribe had multiple gods/pantheons, even the Israelites (Yahwism) and traces can be found throughout the OT.

Introduce them to biblical scholarship and challenge them to actually read books and papers by them. Explain to them the problem with apologists is that every single time the conclusion is presupposed in favor of their pet theory-it’s never an honest, intellectually open question. Devotional approaches to the Bible aren’t looking for truth-they are looking for self-validation. This needs to be pointed out at every turn. Ask them if the conclusion can ever be anything different than what they already believe-if not, then what’s the point in discussion with them? I’d compare and contrast the fact that many Bible scholars are believing, practicing Christian’s who’ve had to figure out how to square their faith with facts. The problem with only addressing each issue as though it’s in a vacuum, like the one you’ve raised, is that it hides the actual problem: that Christian is not actually, honestly engaging with the text, the language, the history, the archeology. They need to be introduced to looking at the Bible in no different terms than what anything else in life is, that is to say, a part of the world-stage of literature, part of actual history, etc-it didn’t exist in the bubble that Christians want it to be in, and it isn’t unique in the sense they need it to be.

@@hardwork8395 thanks for the help but my head just exploded 🤣🤭

One other thing I think is important to note. There is a massive, unearned sense of entitlement many Christians have with the Bible. They essentially act as if they own it-as if only their view matters on the text because they are believers…and likely because they think they have a unique line to their God via his spirit. This “spiritual smugness” keeps them from actually engaging with most non-Christians in these conversations. It insulates their usual sense of fairness; they refuse dealing with evidence in the same way they would if we were talking about non-religious subjects, or if we were talking about a religion they don’t believe in. Their standards of evidence and argumentation change if they aren’t defending their pet beliefs.

First they have to define "god".

@@digitaljanus yeah true and they always say jesus or the jewish/christian god yahweh so idk

If we were to go only by Exodus (I don’t recommend that), Moses should have written in Egyptian. But then the authors seem to have thought that words had inherent meaning. For example, Adam is supposed to understand everything Yahweh says, even tho he had just been created and had no apparent time to learn the 8th-5th C BCE Hebrew of Genesis.

@@scienceexplains302 Adam did eat from the fruit of knowledge though. Not sure why he'd need to know how to read and write.

@@sadib100 Who said anything about Adam reading or writing? I was using his understanding of Yahweh Elohim’s words as an example of how the authors seemed to view language acquisition

@@scienceexplains302 The authors weren't aware of multiple languages?

@@sadib100 “aware of multiple languages?”They must have been, but in the story, they don’t seem to be. Moses speaks to Hebrews, Midianites, and apparently Egyptians freely, but the authors never mention a switch of language nor how Moses learned Hebrew. The Hebrew spoken is of a later period than any possible date for Moses… basically the ancestors of the people of the Kingdoms didn’t speak what we now call Hebrew, they spoke a dialect of Canaanite.

Mark 12:29-31 O hear O Israel The Lord thy God is one... Pissed off everyone with that public statement😅

I'm not sure I buy that. The transition to monotheism is a complex one, but I don't think I've seen any scholarship suggesting it started with Jesus. Or even with Christianity. It would be interesting to see a bit more on how that's thought to have happened. It certainly wasn't early in Judaism, but was it something that developed during 2nd temple Judaism?

I never said that monotheism started with Jesus claiming that Yahweh was the only god in a time when pantheism was the norm, only that the claim angered pretty much everybody. The transition to monotheism was conducted at the end of a sword, and took a millenia after they nailed him to a tree.

​​@@tussk.This argument doesn't work for 1 major reason. Jesus wasn't saying this to the pagans, he was saying this to the Jews. I don't think this has anything to do with Yaweh being the only God, but the lord either being 1 complete being, or more likely, reminding them that the god of ISREAL is 1 in number.

The new testament is also clear that the romans didn't care what Jesus preached, but the jews saw his teachings as blasphemy and strong armed Rome into killing Jesus. In the narratives pagans are more than happy to convert. So your reading makes no sense. Jesus was not exposing monotheism and that is not why there was push back or why he was killed according to the bible. Jesus was carrying on the rhetoric of the hebrew bible that the god of Isreal, Yaweh, was the God of Isreal, and that is it

Israeli archeologists have buried the Exodus. 1: Egypt ruled Canaan and maintained a string of fortress sites from Byblos to the Delta from around 1530 to 1126BCE 2: The Israelites were just another Canaanite tribe living in the hills of Judah 3: The Israeli archeologists were chartered to find evidence to support the bible, instead they found the truth based on facts.

No evidence of historicity for Moses.

@@DavidAlastairHayden do you have some sources for that, please?

@@chadkent327 How about the Israeli archeologists who found 300 proto-Israelite villages in the hills of Canaan. or the Egyptian fortress cities that proves Egypt ruled Canaan from around 1530BCE until 1126 BCE.

@@chadkent327 Dan actually has a video titled "Was Moses a Real Person" if you wanted to watch it.

The difference is these discussions lead to laws getting passed

Understanding how religious beliefs form and develop in a culture is pretty important and applicable to current day society, as well as informing our ability to separate actual history from mythology and dogma. And I know you meant that crack about about lord of the rings as a put down, but understanding literature is also pretty important field of study. You should try to keep a more open mind about different fields of study rather than trying to dismiss them as “nerds getting into the weeds.”

@@chadkent327 This says nothing about how religious stories get made up, nor is it a path to understanding history. I agree that LOTR is literature, the bible, not so much.

@@timothywilliams8530 Yes because grifters, liars and conmen prey on the ignorant. Stop teaching lies and put the money into critical thinking skills and civics and the grifters can no longer grift. We'll all be better off.

@@davidmcnaughty4889 This video is literally a discussion of how people read monotheism back into polytheistic writings, and the historical beliefs of the Hebrews. It’s about history and the development of religious ideas like I said. I’m not sure why you’re so hostile to this type of scholarship.

Heresy. I saw him destroy Kareem Abdul Jabbar and win the 1983 NBA Finals with my very eyes. Looking at a television. In tape delay.

Well, sometimes you have to pretend that a person existed when they didn't because they should have. You know, I have always loved and enjoyed the stories of the wh*res in the Bible like Rahab, Gomer, Jezebel, and the Magdalena. What's up party people!

Except that there are "other names", so it can't be universal.

It's a better idea to get evidence and figure out which parts are true. You can't just paper over the internal contradictions nor the contradictions with scientific and archaeological evidence. Best IMO to assume it's all fiction until proven otherwise.

No as the dragon is figurative to first century Roman occupation, Secondly, if other gods don’t exist then God did the plagues of Egypt for FUN. If he didn’t do it to embarrass the Egyptian gods then it’s literally just for fun and god is a monster.

Everything you've quoted is from the NT. Moses (which is the topic of the conversation) and the religious views in and around the putative time period of Moses is all OT material. (You do realize that, right?... right?... Right?) So, everything in this video is about the theistic views of the OT period (NOT the NT period).

​@@timothywilliams8530 {The dragon is figurative to first century Roman occupation} Well, that's a fine theory, except for the fact that Rev 12:9 actually defines "the great dragon" as being that old serpent the Devil and Satan, not as being the Roman occupation. "And the great dragon was cast out," Who was cast out? "THAT old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, ... HE was cast out into the earth, ...." So if the dragon is figurative of Roman occupation, then logically so must also be the old serpent the Devil and Satan. Don't you think it's just a tiny bit obvious, that Rev 12:9 actually shows that the dragon is figurative of Satan the Devil. Also, how exactly do you cast the Roman occupation out into the earth? Egypt & the plagues? Yes, another God did exist in Egypt - Satan. Satan is "...the god of this world ...." (2 Cor 4:4)

​@@RD-jc2eu {... about the theistic views of the OT period...} Yes, I do realise that. Although to be more specific, it is about; Does the OT present any other gods, apart from God, as literal actual existing living beings in reality? Yes it does, but the only one it does present, is Satan. Anything the OT presents, as actually being a real literal event, involving the actions of another god, apart from God, it's actually Satan. And Satan also deceives by his actions as well as by his words. The NT presents the same view. He has certainly got scholars like Dan fooled into thinking the OT is presenting quite the little stamped of gods all over the place, when it's only one - him.

You can call yourself whatever you like, doesn’t make you a scholar.

What are you even talking about?

"the scholars"? Which scholars? From where? From when? Stating that as a universal absolute rather than identifying the specific subset of scholars for whom that statement is true could be fairly described as "misrepresenting the fullness of scholarly belief." (Here's a hint: It most certainly is not ALL scholars... by a long shot.)

you're

@@RD-jc2eu the reply is directed at the creator of the video, and therefore in reference to the same biblical scholars he is referring too which I myself am aware of. Also, it’s all fine and well for you to ask for what scholars buuut don’t assume it invalidates the argument nor should you take your own credit as a “pressumed” biblical scholar as evidence that this isn’t the most modern held belief in scholarship. These are called fallacies.