Ah yes Runner, the greatest story ever told, about a man who could walk on water, raise the dead, cure the incurable, and feed thousands from his personal picnic basket; a veritable horn of plenty!

And not so much as a single eyewitness account; but hearsay and quite rampant plagiarism, coupled to endless embellishment.

And given so much of what we believe is founded on the exodus, i.e., the 14 commandments?

What happens when the archaeological evidence categorically proves that no such exodus occurred, and therefore, there was no great journey through an inhospitable desert; and therefore no burning bush carving words into tablets of stone; and for a population that could neither read or write?

What happens to a belief system, when its very foundations are effectively destroyed by the revealed truth?

One would have thought an all knowing everywhere present omnipotent power, would have known this shortcoming in his/her target audience and produced a different means to inform them of his/her will?

And given there was no such exodus, no promised land!?

This is the conundrum in faith based belief; it can be very easily destroyed by thorough investigation and the revealed facts!

There is a flat earth society, which has its H.Q. in London; and among its devotees surely are "people", who know the world is flat; and no amount of credible evidence, will prove otherwise?

Similarly, we have people in the M.E., who believe God (Love personified)commands them to slaughter, in the most vile, cruel inhumane means possible, anyone who doesn't believe as they do!

Faith based belief, particularly if unprovable by any means, has a lot to answer for!

It's time we just turned our eyes and ears to the mighty irrefutable truth!

If you can't prove it however credible, even with a billion PHD's, then it has to remain opinion or unproven theory; rather than a means to create unrest, quite blatant enmity or the slaughter of millions of innocents!

If there's a Paradise, then there can be no place in it for these mass murdering sub species!
Rhrosty.

runner
<<reject Christ (Truth personsified) and you end up defending all sorts of fallacies such and gw, evolution and baby killing.You can even get phd's to prove your point.>>

None of those are fallacies. Two are observed phenomena and the third is an action not a belief.

Accept Christ, but beware of the fallacy that accepting Christ is sufficient to avoid all other fallacies. Look at George W Bush if you require further proof that it is a fallacy.

'One would have thought an all knowing everywhere present omnipotent power, would have known this shortcoming in his/her target audience and produced a different means to inform them of his/her will?'

More to the point Rhrosty 'an all knowing everywhere present omnipotent power,' was able to see that people like you would choose wilful ignorance.

Hi Don,

To get back to topic: the truth doesn't have to rely on what is said or asserted, but on inconvenient things called facts.

Stories are easy: if something sounds plausible, then children think it must be true. But we watch probably thousands of crime stories on TV, most of them quite plausible and coherent, but we know that they are just stories.

Narrative theory, I think they call it.

However, out in the real world, there are such things as facts. I've been typing up primary documents in relation to Aboriginal policy and practice here in South Australia, from 1837 up to 1913, and I was surprised to find that there was only one full-time employee in the 'Aborigines Department': the Protector, whose main job was to keep up to seventy ration depots supplied. When one Protector resigned in 1857, the 'Department' vanished until another one could be appointed. South Australia is not a very big State, particularly if its western half is left out, so sixty or seventy depots across half a million square kilometres means that all Aboriginal people were within fifty or sixty kilometres of a depot. Facts. I've put it all on a web-site: www.firstsoures.info

Many of those depots were still issuing rations in the late 1940s. The amount of rations was equal to those provided in jails and in the Destitute Asylum, (with extra meat and milk for mothers and children and the sick), and free medical attendance, with the added benefit that the rights of Aboriginal people to hunt, fish and gather food was protected by legislation under the Pastoral Act, emanating from the 1837 Letters Patent, recognising their right to 'occupy and enjoy' their lands, i.e. use them as they always had. Facts.

[TBC]

[continued]

The Protector provided up to a hundred boats on most waterways, 14-15-ft 'canoes', 5-ft wide, even up on Cooper's Creek (as well as fishing gear, lines, hooks and netting twine). Guns and boats were repaired free for Aboriginal people who couldn't work. Facts.

Issuers at depots weren't paid. Fact. Many of them were coppers, and Police Commissioner Warburton complained in about 1861 that they were expected to set aside a room for rations, and didn't get paid a penny for their efforts.

I'm currently working on the 1934 Moseley Commission in western Australia, looking closely for any evidence of the rabbit-proof fence story, but so far nothing.

Stories are very satisfying, they tie up all the loose ends, they make sense, they contain powerful messages that one may want to hear, and so provide 'evidence' for one's point of view. But they may not be 'true', i.e. not only may there be no evidence for them but there may be glaring impossibilities and contradictions.

For example, there is one lovely story down this way of an Aboriginal woman taken over to Kangaroo Island by sealers, but swimming back to the mainland with a baby on her back. Nobody has ever done that, mainly because of the currents which would take a swimmer a couple of hundred kilometres away. Nice story, but.

[TBC]

[continued]

Of course, 'facts' can be fabricated, but not all of them. And that fabrication works both ways. In the Hindmarsh island scam, there was talk of a peaceful 'meeting of the waters', of the Murray River and the sea, meeting at Goolwa. But there are such things as tides. With two tides a day, and a narrow river mouth, there is no peaceful meeting of the waters, as many ship's captains have learnt too late: king tides and low river-levels mean the sea used to surge fifty, even a hundred, miles up the river, while low tides and a river in flood meant that the waters 'met' well out to sea. Sturt could see that back in 1829 and advised not to build a capital city at the mouth.

I was very surprised to learn that Aboriginal people were not, at least in South Australia, driven off their lands: time and time again, the Protector reminds police and other issuers to try 'to keep people in their own districts'. Pastoralists needed labour, after all. In 1876, a missionary wrote complaining about a new pastoralist who wanted to expel Aborigines from his lease, but was reminded that he would be in breach of the lease conditions.

Yes, there are such things as records, documents, 'facts', but if we don't have much of a grasp of them, we will continue to infer and suspect and come to all sorts of wrong conclusions.

God knows what is being taught in Indigenous Studies these days: I talked to one lecturer about the early Protectors and their roles, and a growing horror came over her face as she quickly realised that it could not be squared with what she had been teaching for twenty years, and finally she put her hands over her ears, turned away and said "I don't want to hear any more !" One friend fewer :(

But what should count ? What should we base our perceptions of history on ? Nice stories ? Or inconvenient 'facts' ?

Joe