The first thing you need to do is to figure out if Jesus was real or not to you.
This is 110% irrelevant to whether or not a million slaves walked out of an ancient city.
Once you get this resolved, once you realize this man made huge claims about being the Son of God and about preaching all kinds of stuff that people base their lives on, then you will take this next point and think about it for a minute
Funny how you spontanously conclude that I will get it "resolved" by concluding that the dude existed AND that I will automatically believe everything the bible says about him.
Are you joking or really this naive?
Jesus talked about the Exodus, he based His teachings on it, on His own credibility and Authority:
I don't care. It's irrelevant to whether a million slaves walked out of an ancient city or not. A billion people could believe it with certainty and their belief could still be wrong.
Argument from authority and argument from popular opinion. Both are logical fallacies. Claims fall and stand on their own merrit. So any claim about a dude in Jeruzalem around the year 0 has no relevancy whatsoever to claims about slaves in Egypt centuries or millenia before that.
To say the Exodus did not happen is also like saying Jesus is a liar and His teachings are false and He isn't an important person and Christianity might as well collapse.
I don't consider this a problem. Your emotional attachment to the new testament is irrelevant to whether or not a million slaves walked out of an ancient city.
I see what you are saying, the Egyptians for sure should have plenty of heiroglyphics, statues, stories, whatever of this event happening.
Not only the egyptians. Or not even necessarily. I could imagine them trying to 'censor' such a thing to save them from embarassement in the chronicles of history. What I cannot imagine is that there would be no evidence of such an event other then writing.
Like said, the economic backlash of a million slaves walking out of Egypt in those times should have completely crippled that civilisation. To the point of it collapsing in on itself. But nothing in history shows that this happened. Instead, the civilisation simply continued to thrive and prosper. This does not make sense if the event actually took place.
We're talking about the ancient equivalent of a super power which overnight loses an extremely big part of its workforce. I shouldn't have to explain what the effect of such an event should be. But this effect wasn't there. Not even remotely. The civilisation simply continued as if nothing happened and in fact continued to grow economically. Honestly, this alone rules out that the event ever took place at all.
But do you know what happens when Kings or Pharoahs get humiliated or defeated? They destroy the evidence!!!
But their rivals and neighbours don't. Also, you can't destroy the evidence of your society collapsing. If society collapses, then society collapses. There's no "pretending nothing happened" possible there.
How many times through history have people destroyed archeological evidence?
How many times in history have people covered up the collapse of a super power?
Imagine the collapse of the Soviets.... Do you really believe that the Russians could have been able to "cover up" their collapse and simply continue as if nothing happened? Off course not. The civilisation is done. Game over. There's no "destroying the evidence" here. There's no "pretending nother happened" here.
Rather, it's mass starvation, economic depression and losing your status as a super-power with no hope of rapid recovery at all - if recovery is even possible in the long run. It sure wasn't the case for the soviets. And considering the make-up of ancient egyptian civilisation, there simply is NO WAY that they could have recovered from a million slaves walking out overnight. A MILLION slaves. DOUBLE the amount of people that were present in the audience of Woodstock '69 (go look up a pic of the festival to see just how much worker hands that is).
To claim that such an event could take place without egyptian civilisation collapsing into rubble is mindblowingly ignorant.
What about Pharoah Thutmoses III who destroyed almost all records of Queen Hatshepsut, whom he despised?
How do we know about this? Ever thought of that?
What about some priests who eliminated almost all teachings of Pharoah Akhenaten, who made heretical religious reforms?[/quote]
None of these examples are comparable to an ancient superpower losing a million worker hands overnight.
What about people even today are still not sure what really happened during the World Wars, some even deny the Holocaust happened!
Denying the evidence is not the same as not having the evidence.
So imagine a huge group of slave people just escaped their country and destroyed the Egyptian army with no weapons!
My imagination isn't big enough to be honest, but ok.
That would be humiliating for the Nation of Egypt. They have a history of covering up such events.
1. they have a history of TRYING to cover things up. But as you demonstrated here, they didn't really succeed, because we actually know about these events.
2. you can't cover up things that would make your society collapse. All the examples you gave do not compare at all.
For 1800 years, skeptics have been refuting and overthrowing this book, and yet it stands today as a solid rock...The skeptics, with all their assaults, make about as much impression on this book as a man with a hammer would on the Pyramids of Egypt. When a French monarch proposed persecuting Christians, an elderly advisor told him, Sir, the Church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers. So the hammers of the skeptics have been pecking away at this book for ages, but the hammers are worn out, and the anvil still endures. If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago. Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it; they have all died and yet this book lives on.The Exodus Controversy
[/quote]
The only thing that this quote proves is that theists will believe no matter what. Again an argument from popular opinion. It doesn't matter how many people believe a certain thing or how hard they believe it.
