Parent’s don’t lie to their children? Sure they do. All the time. Where do you think the story of the stork comes from? The tooth fairy? Santa Claus?

Parents tell their children stories so that the kids stop asking questions, or to make the kids feel comfortable. Sometimes parents just repeat the same story their parents told them. There are all kinds of reasons to invent a story about where the house rules come from aside from sincere belief.

Posted: February 14th 2009

See all questions answered by George Locke

I don’t think we need to make accusations of deliberate lying in order to say that the claims of Judaism are not credible. The originators of the stories could simply have been mistaken, could have misinterpreted events, could have read a significance into them that simply wasn’t there.

The stories could then have been passed on in good faith over the centuries – but that doesn’t mean the original story was actually TRUE.

You only have to look around you today to see how people read mystical meanings into everyday events. A cloud looks like the face of someone’s granny, and they interpret it as Granny trying to communicate with them. We drive through a particular junction just one minute before there’s a terrible car crash there which claims several lives – and many of us feel tempted to feel that there must have been a reason why we were “spared” (and there IS a reason, of course: we survived because we passed through a minute before the accident happened!). A friend phones us on the very day we just happened to be thinking that it was a very long time since we’d heard from them, and we are inclined to see a telepathic connection between our thought and the friend’s action. We see some unusual lights in the sky and think it might be a UFO. We trip down the stairs and break our ankle and attribute it, not to the fact that the dog left its ball lying where we didn’t see it, but to the fact that we walked under a ladder yesterday.

Humans are forever reading INTENTION into ACCIDENT. And there are good evolutionary reasons for this: if you’re paddling in the Nile and hear a splash, it is far more conducive to your survival to assume that it’s been caused by something with an intention – a hungry crocodile, for instance – and to get out of the water quickly; than to assume that it’s probably just a branch dropping off a tree and into the water.

So, having evolved to look for CAUSES and INTENTIONS for things, we do: but we often just take it too far, and assume supernatural causes and intentions, simply because we cannot find natural ones that we understand. And, of course, back when the stories of Judaism were taking shape, humans understood far less about the natural world than we do now and so would have been even more inclined to look for supernatural explanations.

Test after test after test has shown that humans are actually terribly unreliable witnesses, terribly prone to see what isn’t there or not to see what is; and also very bad at accurately conveying what we HAVE seen. An innocent game of Chinese Whispers will show you how very quickly stories become distorted beyond recognition, without any intentional lying going on at all.

So no. Simply taking someone’s word for something isn’t enough, especially when we’re talking about events that purportedly happened thousands of years ago and have had all that time in which the story could have become distorted. We need to be able to verify claims through evidence. And, as Christopher Hitchens has said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You know this yourself: if a friend told you he’d had roast chicken for dinner, it wouldn’t cross your mind to question it. But if he told you he’d had roast Martian for dinner, I suspect you’d be less willing to take him at his word and would want to see convincing evidence before you were prepared to believe him.

There is no active proof that Judaism is false, same as there is no proof that Jesus DIDN’T rise from the dead or that Muhammed DIDN’T fly off to heaven on a winged horse. The point in all these cases is that there is no positive reason to believe that the claims are TRUE.

Posted: February 12th 2009

See all questions answered by Paula Kirby

There’s no proof that Judaism is false, because nobody’s shuffled through all the sand in the Middle East and completely ruled out the possibility of these events. Nobody ever could.

There is however a complete lack of available physical evidence that a population of Israelites ever wandered the Sinai peninsula (let alone Mt Sinai), or was enslaved by the Egyptians, or that Moses ever existed. That’s the reason for this appeal to the perfect honesty of the Jewish people. If you believe in this, you’ll believe in God without a shred of evidence. This, therefore, is what I need to address.

Parents the world over do regularly lie to their children, and I don’t know why Jewish parents should be any different. They lie in several different ways, too.

There are the flat-out lies, like Santa Claus or the idea that if the wind changes while you’re pulling a face it will get stuck. The purpose of these lies is to encourage good and safe behaviour, through hope of reward and fear of punishment. Such superstitious lies are usually discarded once children reach a certain age, but their emotional impact remains and often transfers to objects of religious worship, like Yahweh.

Some lies are told to children as substitutes for concepts they would not understand. A dead dog has “gone to sleep.” A little brother’s illness is caused by “goblins” in his body. That same little brother was “brought by the stork”. Some of these are again discarded, like the stork, but some may gradually evolve into the facts, like goblins into germs.

Some lies are told specifically to protect children from upsetting or traumatising realities. Daddy hasn’t run away with another woman, he’s gone to another country to help the poor, or he’s been killed in an accident, or both. Lies like this might never be corrected.

See the common thread? The lies are all told for the benefit of the children. To apply this idea to the subject at hand: what better way to give a child the marvellous “gift” of belief than to back it up with the voices of six million apparently honest Jews (who now cannot object)?

It’s not as if one Jewish parent had to come up with the whole whopper at once. If a man had what he thought was a divine experience, he would tell as many people as he could, and those who believed him would pass it on. Over time, as the “Chinese whispers” effect took hold, it might be very easy to misrepresent those first people the man told as witnesses to the original event. Generations on, when storytellers have lost track of exactly who was a witness, it might be easier to simply say everybody was. If the numbers got inflated, what was the harm? All the more reason to believe in God and believe that the Jews are the chosen people. Furthermore, if children heard it from outside their families first, they might simply assume that their own families would say the same thing.

Despite all the exaggerations and assumptions, every person in the chain would believe that he or she is fundamentally honest.

That’s one scenario, wherein a long line of honest people creates a big lie without anyone noticing along the way. I think it would be easy, given that it benefits the Jewish people (in their own estimation) for their children to believe this story.

Of course it might not have happened this way at all, but I just wanted to demonstrate the opportunities inherent in word-of-mouth for the truth to be distorted. Now perhaps you can see how the story could have been faked, whether or not you think it really was.

Posted: February 9th 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX