Religion is so fuckinv stupid idk how anyone can take even the smallest bit of this shit seriously. I literally cannot fathom a person being a Christian with the knowledge that there's like 57 different fucking flavors of christianity. How the fuck do you know you got the real one? You don't, dummy. Sorry the real true church of god is some splinter from some catholic heresy that only exists in the mountains of Ethiopia or some shit
And then you've got stuff like the split between Jews and Samaritans (ignoring all the differences between Jews of varying orthodoxy) with the Samaritans believing they follow the REAL Torah
Every theological debate i've ever seen or witnessed just comes off as people masturbating over fan fiction
And like...Egypt has been subject to quite a bit of archeology. Like, if you think of that country it's the first thing that comes to a western white person's mind. If anything they were looking for any evidence of early Israelite artifacts and still nothing. It is a pretty sweet story to tell about your neighborhood tho
It's kinda amazing that the ancient Egyptians made some giant piles of bricks and thousands of years later they are the first thing the average person thinks of. Alexandria probably intentionally fell into the sea because it knew everyone would just think of the pyramids when imagining Egypt. "Guess I'll just sink myself."
Egypt has continued to be a pretty notable country for pretty much ever as well. It's not like people weren't seeing the pyramids constantly all the time throughout all the important events, Egypt has been a very historically important place for always, a d yet these incredibly ancient triangles are what continues to fascinate us. To the point a lot of people think aliens made them.or illuminati shit. If I was a guy dragging a block to build the pyramid and had the capacity to know that this would be be THE edifice to represent your time for thousands of years, I'd be whistling while I worked and would probably have signed a block if I knew how. Imagine making g something that lasted that long being your construction gig
I always enjoy thinking about stuff like that. Imagining some cynic at the pyramid construction muttering about how nobody is gonna care about the pyramids in 500 years. "Buildings come and go. But papyrus? Now that's permanent."
Like imagining that dude in Pompeii who grabbed his junk as the ash buried him doing it as a bit. I'm 99% sure he did it because his reasoning was "ow my balls" but there's the slightest chance he was like "lol people will think I was jacking off one last time."
“Buildings come and go. But papyrus? Now that’s permanent.”
Funnily enough, the oldest surviving examples of papyrus used for writing are roughly from the same time as the building of the great pyramids. So you can say it was a new fad then.
Even further back people inhabiting the Palestine area were polytheistic. The Abrahamic god almost certainly evolved from Yahweh and merged with El and Baal (and developed further of course).
And the Egyptian thing is 100% myth. Likely due to Egypt dominating the area for several thousand years. As far as I remember, there's barely any evidence any significant number of Jewish settlement in Ancient Egypt at all. They definitely were interacting with each other, even looks like Egypt even conquered them at some point.
The interesting thing is that there is evidence of Jewish settlement in Egypt (after the Exodus supposedly happened), but the evidence suggests that the community was composed of relatively wealthy administrators.
Every time I try to read a philosophy textbook and it goes into arguments for the existence of any sort of gods, or, more precisely, into the existence of the Christian one, I marvel at those arguments not being dismissed immediately, given how childish they are.
In particular, I have encountered this in a textbook recently: 'god is the most perfect being imaginable and if it did not exist, it would not be perfect'. By that logic, because I can imagine a 10^100000 year old person who openly lives as such and is well-known by everybody in the world, and because to be 10^100000 year old and to live that person would have to exist, such a person exists. Also, Pascal's Wager is probably very well known at this point and how silly and poorly thought-out it is.
Nonsense like that makes me think that philosophy in general is a silly field that lacks any sort of rigour. Hell, they seem to be amazed at the 'cogito ergo sum' line, despite the fact that in the practical contexts where it is true it is obvious, and in the contexts where it isn't true it is, well, not true.
Hot take: philosophers in general should be forced to adopt higher standards of rigour.
One of the jokes of existential comics is that your average gym bro holds themselves to a higher standard of academic rigor than your average academic philosopher.