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The author neglects to note the most famous, successful and longevitous example: Israel. Millions of Jews followed Moses into the Sinai desert to build an inte

• davidrusu 10y ago
  Or lack of evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Archaeology Please don't assume bad intentions
  • Kinnard 10y ago
    Who said anything about bad?
  • kirse 10y ago
    This is where Wikipedia really fails. It makes a statement with huge implications, like: A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness Which dismisses a "century of research" based on a single little citation: Meyers 2005, p. 5. Which upon visiting the book, provides the same blanket statement at the bottom of the page, and is itself a citation to yet another external resource. Did you even bother to investigate the "lack of evidence" claims yourself, or did you just assume the entire black hole of citations was correct?
    • powera 10y ago
      Do you have any evidence for your claim?
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Millions of Jews followed Moses into the Sinai desert to built an intentional community over 3,000 year ago and the project is still going today That absolutely did not happen. If anything like the Exodus as written happened -- and there are plenty of reasons to doubt that it did -- it didn't involve millions of people, a number which the Bible doesn't even claim and which would be implausible for the Hebrew population in Egypt at the time.
  • Kinnard 10y ago
    You are correct that that number doesn't appear in the Bible, it's extrapolated from the count of 600,000 which only included males over the age of twenty. And lots of people contend the number is not meant to be interpreted literally: http://www.aish.com/atr/Number_of_Jews_at_Exodus.html http://www.aish.com/atr/Number_of_Jews_at_Exodus.html
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > And lots of people contend the number is not meant to be interpreted literally: http://www.aish.com/atr/Number_of_Jews_at_Exodus.html http://www.aish.com/atr/Number_of_Jews_at_Exodus.html Your source does not, in fact, contend that, it takes the number of adult males literally, reports the larger figures as extrapolations of the total population from it, including a specific figure of around 3 million in the Exodus out of 15 million Jews (about twice the population of modern Israel) that were in Egypt at the time of the Exodus. There being 3 million Jews in Egypt at any time that would fit the Exodus is fairly implausible; 15 million well exceeds all estimates I've seen of the plausible total population of Egypt at any such time. Now, certainly, that number shouldn't be taken literally, and there's good reason to doubt whether the outline of the story beyond the number should be, either, which is why it makes not to cite it as a historical example of, well, anything other than a religious myth.
      • Kinnard 10y ago
        What methods do you use to estimate the plausible population of ancient civilizations? Most secular academics do see the Exodus as legendary, but not mythical. You've heard of the Hyksos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos Striking parralells . . .
• nommm-nommm 10y ago
  The Exodus is not a historically accurate account and archeological evidence doesn't support it.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• petra 10y ago
  Well the jews we're unique that they combined the power of a religious community and religion in general(religion do activate core psychological mechanisms among humans, and a good way to inherit ideals to children) together with being extremely closed to the outside world, both because because they choose so, but this was also forced on them through history, most strongly embodied in the holocaust, one major reason for the existence a Israel as the place where most Jews live. And as a religion, lasting 3000 years isn't that unique. Christianity and buddhism are very old too.
• hackuser 10y ago
  How does that differ from many other religions? The Mormons, for example?
  • Kinnard 10y ago
    > Most of the intentional community projects of the 19th Century are explicitly modeled on this. Mormons are one such community.