There’s “science doesn’t adequately explain the origins of the universe,” and then there’s “this particular middle eastern tribe had the right answers thousands of years ago.” I can see the former but the latter makes no sense.
That's absolutely not true. First of all, there was an enormous crowd of people: 600,000 families--millions of people--who received the revelation on Mt. Sinai. And secondly, G-d offered the Torah to all the peoples of the world. (https://www.sefaria.org/Sifrei_Devarim.343.2?lang=bi)
It's a fundamental principle of Judaism that all righteous people will be in the world to come, unlike Christianity.
All that being said, I will not be wagering that "Jesus" will come again.
It's true that it was very regional, within the reach of a group of people's ability to communicate.
> And secondly, G-d offered the Torah to all the peoples of the world.
Did he? Did all the other cultures of the world about that time simply not answer the door?
You're assuming too much about the motivations. I do not see what the issue is with a "very human scale" for messaging. That's...how you communicate with humans.
People now know about god, but they wouldn't have 3,000 years ago. And it's only one particular culture that was being communicated with, or did the Chinese and Native Americans just ignore him when tried to message them?
> I do not see what the issue is with a "very human scale" for messaging. That's...how you communicate with humans.
It's because its messaging seems to have originated from a very small and region specific group of people, instead of, you know, being communicated across the world.
In any case, it was definitely communicated across the world. If you're picking a specific point in time when first contact was established according to a specific tradition, that might raise a question of why first contract there and in that way. But we in 2025 have the hindsight of seeing what happened globally after that and spread it did.
I don't think it is a coincidence that specific groups of people received revelation the way they did, when considering things like the quality of their oral and scribed history. Would you pick a region of people who don't know how to write and barely know how to talk, or a region of people who are highly skilled in both?
What do you mean? Did the non-Judeo-Christian faiths know about him or not? What was their relationship to it?
> But we in 2025 have the hindsight of seeing what happened globally after that and spread it did.
Sure, it only took thousands of years and a co-opting of the original message by an apocalyptic Galilean preacher changing the message and constant re-envisioning through history. And if the end game is half people in the world still not believing (if we generously assume that both Christianity and Islam are equal and valid in the eyes of the Hewbrew god), I guess mission accomplished.
> I don't think it is a coincidence that specific groups of people received revelation the way they did, when considering things like the quality of their oral and written history. Would you pick a region of people who don't know how to write and barely know how to talk, or a region of people who are highly skilled in both?
But in the case of a place like China, writing was definitely in the cards. Ancient Babylon had writing long before that as well, so that's not a good reason.
Right. Why would the omnipotent creator of the universe communicate the same way I do?
Faith is a concept, like so many other concepts. It is a unique creation that has properties, one of them is that it’s not meant to be provable that easily.
> When Michael Jackson does a concert, it’s really only in a few locations. It’s up to the world to spread it.
In this example, what is up to the world to spread for Michael Jackson? Is god a singular entity with a specific location? I'm sure Michael would have happily shown up in every place on earth if he could have sold tickets.
If ever there were a post-hoc rationalization, this is it.
It's funny how the faithful are generally happy to use any evidence that they think supports the faith, but once it gets too difficult then suddenly it's not supposed to have too much evidence for it.
Israel’s creation story gets every step in the right order.
How?