..but coming from a disbeliever, that is meaningless.
It isn't. The Torah is not corrupted regarding the mythology it wanted to tell. Yahweh is the God people wrote him as. Theu were modeling him after older gods because the stuff about revelations is not true. Every of the 10,000 religions said they had the real god and they were getting the real revelations. They were all telling embellishments to convince their followers. Looks like all religions do this.
..but you have already told us that people were worshiping many gods, and that meanings have
changed/evolved over time.
..so how is it, that you can tell us that they are "accurate descriptions" .. what do you mean by that?
It means in that time people were used to other religions having more than one god. People were used to gods being part of a pantheon.
So when Yahweh was claimed to be the god of Israel, the religious leaders wrote stories about him from a reference point they understood.
A warrior god who lived in the Temple while on earth, who looked like a human, fought sea monsters, walked with humans.
This was common for gods and the thing about revelations is made up. So they had no actual god to tell them what was not true.
This is clear evidence. Their Satan was an agent of Yahweh.
Later when they lived with the Persians, all of a sudden we see the Persian ideas - Satan/God in a endless struggle, a final war where god defeats satan, all followers get a bodily resurrection and live on earth in paradise.
Then, suddenly after the GReeks occupy, we now have souls that are from heaven and go back to heaven, personal salvation, and all the Greek theology.
No god told them this, they saw it in Greek religions and Hebrew leaders slowly started saying "we too are getting a savior", God and Satan will fight before the return of the messiah, and so on. Old stories now made new for a different nation.
Each phase were accurate descriptions for the time, it's fiction, there is no "accurate description". Not even the modern Platonic stuff that Aquinas, Al-Hazeli and others added to.
People just came up with ways to make god fit in with new ideas and philosophy.
In the OT and NT they believed in the 7 heavens. Yahweh lived in heaven, alone. Once astronomy began and astronomers could see space, see no 7 heavens, (3rd heaven is where the celestial copies of earth and the temple are) they quickly had to start figuring out a new cosmology for god.
"Outside space and time" Plato said "The One" was. Aquinas picked up on this and now God lived beyond space and time.
George Berkely championed Idealism, showed materialism is false in Three Dialogues, as does Ghazeli.
Said the universe was deterministic and life can not come from non-life (sticks and stones).
They did not know quantum mechanics would also show materialism is an illusion, determinism is false, indeterminism is true, but the illusion is from being a macroscopic being with the quantum world below us.
Yes it's an illusion, built from probabilities and particles that do not follow Newtonian laws. Very -wu-wu. But not wu-wu in a "conscious being started it all". The forces of nature are unconscious. Consciousness evolved slowly over billions of years.
Metal cannot do math either. But a metal calculator can. Computers are slowly learning, advancing and may achieve consciousness as well.
It's fiction we make up as we go.
I never said that Judaism was corrupt or ignorant .. I said that the people of old were ignorant..
..they were illiterate.
They were not all illiterate. The Bible version of Judaism is a version some elites wanted it to be. The general population was not doing that version, as we see from many temple finds. The Bible version didn't exist until 6 BC.
There were no revelations, the Bible stories were edited to reflect new ideas, like Persian monotheism.
They wrote stories that their version was the norm from the beginning. Archaeology does not show that.
Neither is correct. It's fiction either way.
Early variats also show us this istrue, like the early Deuteronomy where El gives Yahweh his inheritance.
That was changed so El later meant Yahweh. Religions do this type of apologetics.
MOYERS:
But haven't some of the greatest saints borrowed from anywhere they could? They
have taken from this and from that, and constructed a new software.
Joseph CAMPBELL:
That is what is called the development of a religion. You can see it in the Bible. In
the beginning, God was simply the most powerful god among many. He is just a local tribal god. And
then in the sixth century, when the Jews were in Babylon, the notion of a world savior came in, and the
biblical divinity moved into a new dimension
You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances. In the
period of the Old Testament, the world was a little three-layer cake, consisting of a few hundred miles
around the Near Eastern centers. No one had ever heard of the Aztecs, or even of the Chinese. When the
world changes, then the religion has to be transformed.
No .. because these "stories" are very old, and did NOT originate with Moses.
One cannot say with certainty, in what region they came from.
We have the Akkadian version, Babylonian versions and others as well. They probably got them from older Sumarian religions.
An African religion is similar:
CAMPBELL: Now, this is from a legend of the Bassari people of West Africa: "Unumbotte made a human being. Its name was Man. Unumbotte next made an antelope, named Antelope. Unumbotte made a snake, named Snake. . . And Unumbotte said to them, 'The earth has not yet been pounded. You must pound the ground smooth where you are sitting.' Unumbotte gave them seeds of all kinds, and said: 'Go plant these.' "
MOYERS: Genesis 2: "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done. . .”
CAMPBELL: And now again from the Pima Indians: "I make the world and lo, the world is finished. Thus I make the world, and lo! The world is finished."
MOYERS: And Genesis 1: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."
”
CAMPBELL: And from the Upanishads: "Then he realized, I indeed, I am this creation, for I have poured it forth from myself. In that way he became this creation. Verily, he who knows this becomes in this creation a creator."
That is the clincher there. When you know this, then you have identified with the creative principle, which is the God power in the world, which means in you. It is beautiful.
MOYERS: But Genesis continues: " 'Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?' The man said, 'The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.' Then the Lord God said to the woman, 'What is this that you have done?' The woman said, 'The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.' "
You talk about buck passing, it starts very early.
CAMPBELL: Yes, it has been tough on serpents. The Bassari legend continues in the same way. "One day Snake said, 'We too should eat these fruits. Why must we go hungry?' Antelope said, 'But we don't know anything about this fruit.' Then Man and his wife took some of the fruit and ate it. Unumbotte came down from the sky and asked, 'Who ate the fruit?' They answered, 'We did.' Unumbotte asked, 'Who told you that you could eat that fruit?' They replied,
'Snake did.' " It is very much the same story.
MOYERS: What do you make of it -- that in these two stories the principal actors point to someone else as the initiator of the Fall?”
CAMPBELL: Yes, but it turns out to be the snake. In both of these stories the snake is the symbol of life throwing off the past and continuing to live.
As the Qur'an states, those that are Christians and Jews will recognise this scripture as they
recognise their own sons!
I was raised as a Christian, and found out about Islam in my 20's.
I had a good educational background, including in Christian theology.
I discovered hadith, of which there are 10's of thousands .. unlike Christianity which has very little
in that department.
Who cares?
I suppose you know all these hadiths.
I don't buy into that line of thinking and as you say, text gets corrupt. The theology in the Quran is enough.
Some Muslims believe that Islamic guidance should be based on the
Quran only, thus rejecting the authority of hadith; some further claim that most hadiths are fabrications (
pseudepigrapha)
[18] created in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, and which are falsely attributed to Muhammad.
[18][19][20] Historically, some sects of the
Kharijites also rejected the hadiths, while
Mu'tazilites rejected the hadiths as the basis for Islamic law, while at the same time accepting the Sunnah and
Ijma.
[21][22] Muslims who
criticise the hadith emphasise that the problems in the
Islamic world
There is nothing new in a Hadith? Go ahead, show me a Hadith that solves a math equation impossible at the time, or explains cosmology, physics, anything at all that humans didn't know. Fusion, atoms are waves and particles, the universe is 13 billion years old.
You missed my point .. you keep going on about Yahweh evolving from being one thing to another etc.
I just pointed out that "names" are not the issue.
People could worship "Yahweh" in times of old, but meaning something completely different.
The idea that this name is sacred, and always has been, is only in your mind.
It's just a word .. and words evolve to mean different things.
So you didn't answer and you are now back to explaining the thing I already knew?
I don't care about names? Your concept of God is not the same as people in the Iron age.
Because theologians learn theology from other nations and upgrade the ideas. Also modern philosophers played a big role.
What God meant then is different now. So what? It just shows revelations are not happening, people are making it all up as they go.
I don't have a great interest in fiqh .. jurisprudence.
..but that doesn't mean I don't respect the well-known Imams.
Ghazali is one of the top Islamic theologians, philosophers, he talks about many concepts like fitra, the natural innate religion in all religions, and is similar to Hume with everything being an emergent property except god, and simple/complex ideas having to do with the mind and direct experience being the best form of what we know to be true.