Dear david f,
How can I not accept such heart-felt apology? You generally write very intelligently and I enjoy your critical approach. Perhaps our ‘drum-beat’ is different, with our differing traditions and identity, but I find the philia (or friendship) that might exist, to be a comfort.

My father too was a religious man, ‘a man of the cloth’, so to speak – alas, I did not follow ‘his path’ nor have I frequented many Church buildings since his sudden death, some 33 years ago. As with your father, mine also occasioned certain clarity – he was a ‘quietly’ intelligent man and I’ve never forgotten his particular legacy.

Sometimes I feel we are a little like the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, whose ‘Ta Panta Rei’ ("Everything Floats") embodied the concept of constant change where everything is in a state of perpetual flux. He attacked popular religion with its concepts and ceremonies. The philosopher ended his days as a hermit, trying to live off the grass on the ground. When this failed he tried to cure himself by sitting on a pile of warm dung, where he died – frustrated, no doubt, at something he was powerless to transform (and it wasn't the dung).

I think the smile of a skeptic is appropriate – in fact I could only laugh, when picturing Heraclitus as he sat, haplessly, upon his final throne

Heraclitus died sitting on a pile of dung. Was he interred where he died?

No not interred... as legend would have it, it gets worse – he was consumed: “So, having ordered his servants to plaster him with the dung [to cure his dropsy], he stretched out in the sun to dry - and was quickly devoured by a pack of ravaging dogs.”

At the recent sitting of the UNO,the delegate from Israel rose to speak.He began his address thus:

A long, long time ago when the children of Israel were wandering about in the desert Moses struck a rock with his staff and a spring of water gushed out. So he took off his garments and had a bath. Unhappily when he had finished he got out to put on his clothes only to find that a thieving Palestinian had stolen them.

The PLO delegate jumped to his feet and protested vociferously.

"I object to such a racist joke. It's no laughing matter,Moshe. We werent even there then."

Moshe : " Quite right and now that you have made my point we can get that out of the way and get on with the rest of my address."

Nice one,Moshe, but the joke is on you guys. Touche.

The really sad part of this crude joke is that there was never such a person as Moses nor were there any such people as the children of Israel.

And I'm no racist.Im just reporting from the book written by Israel Finkenstein and Neil Asher Silberman, "The Bible Unearthed" published by Simon and Schuster in 2001.Silberman and Finkelstein are archaeologists and anthropologists working at the University of Tel Aviv. They had spent many years digging for relics and ruins for any of the "sacred sites" mentioned in the Old Testament but were never able to unearth any such trace.
What are we to make of this?

socratease

At the recent sitting of the UNO,the delegate from Israel rose to speak.He began his address thus:

A long, long time ago when the children of Israel were wandering about in the desert Moses struck a rock with his staff and a spring of water gushed out. So he took off his garments and had a bath. Unhappily when he had finished he got out to put on his clothes only to find that a thieving Palestinian had stolen them.

The PLO delegate jumped to his feet and protested vociferously.

"I object to such a racist joke. It's no laughing matter,Moshe. We werent ewven there then."

Moshe : " Quite right and now that you have made my point we can get that out of the way and get on with the rest of my address."

Nice one,Moshe, but the joke is on you guys. Touche. The really sad part of this crude joke is that there was never such a person as Moses nor were there any such people as the children of Israel.

And I'm no racist.Im just reporting from the book written by Israel Finkenstein and Neil Asher Silberman, "The Bible Unearthed" published by Simon and Schuster in 2001.Silberman and Finkelstein are archaeologists and anthropologists working at the University of Tel Aviv. They had spent many years digging for relics and ruins for any of the "sacred sites" mentioned in the Old Testament but were never able to unearth any such trace.
What are we to make of this?

socratease

socratease,
Blake said that ‘the Whole Bible is fill’d with Imagination and Visions’. Whether Moses lived or not is not the point of the story. The deepest truths are conveyed in symbols and if those symbols drive the narrative identity of the community, they are constellated in myth.

An ancient people wandering in the desert, certainly with some factual basis, is surrounded by legend. The theme of the ‘Tribes of Israel’ is vast, rich in myth and fable. It is a great repository of history and belief, and a point of origin for many very special cultural entities whose background links them on either the theoretical or the empirical plane with the ancient Israelite monarchy. Strangely, if we accept all the current theories regarding the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, then many would pertain to groups which currently go beyond the bounds of Judaism. For example, the Mormons of Utah, the Black Hebrews of Chicago, who claim to be the real Jews (the lighter-skinned ones being a corruption of the original), and the Jamaican Rastafarians, such as the famed reggae singer Bob Marley, who believed to have been descended from the Ten Lost Tribes, exiled first to Ethiopia, and then torn from their homes and brought to the Americas as slaves. This perhaps bears an interesting implication for a real ‘Jewish right of return’.

Artifacts, as found from geological diggings, often only deepen a legend and add to the tapestry. It is only through the understanding of a culture and the symbols surrounding it that we come nearer to finding the truth. A “culture” is the only sphere in which you cannot do the giving, in which you cannot easily push hidden agendas and vested interests, because this is what belongs to the people, it IS the people and not something that is handed to us via politics, religion, or war. However, a truly pluralistic society must determine what stands the test of rationality, and to what is "civilised". The banning of polygamy (here) and the ritual of cow slaughter (India) are perhaps two different but good examples.