Picking Cherries

I never said, nor do I believe, that the Biblical account of the Exodus is literally true. I'm a Deist, remember? All I'm saying is that stories like this come from somewhere. You have asserted that the Israelites never were in Egypt because no archaeological evidence has been found proving that they were. While I admit that's possible, I don't think it's bloody likely. The Israelites were nomadic herdsmen who wandered all over Canaan, and Canaan is right next door to Egypt. Well there's the Sinai Desert between them, but it's possible that the Sinai wasn't always a desert like it is today. Haven't you ever heard of climate change? Secular sources claim that Egypt once ruled Canaan. If the Egyptians could cross the Sinai to invade Canaan, why couldn't the Israelites cross the Sinai looking for greener pastures in Egypt? I gave no ax to grind here, I'm just exploring the possibilities.

Perhaps it is you who are picking cherries. You don't believe in God, so you disregard any evidence that makes mention of God. Okay, there's no scientific evidence that God exists, but people have been telling stories like this for thousands of years before science was invented. Even if you take God out of it, the Bible is a collection of stories that have been told for centuries before they were ever written down. I would be surprised if any of those stories proved to be literally true and scientifically accurate, but I doubt that they were made up out of a clear blue sky by a bunch of old rabbis whiling there time away in Babylonian captivity. I believe that most stories have a grain of truth in them, and also contain a certain amount of bull shit. My mission is to sort the grain out from the bull shit, and to speculate about where the bull shit came from. It's just a hobby, nobody is paying me to do this, I do it because I like to.

I think the reason they used "catholic" in the Apostles' Creed is because that's an old fashioned word that probably was in use at the time the creed was written. Well, the creed was written in Latin, so it would be whatever the Latin word for "catholic" is. I have come across references in old literature describing somebody as "a man of catholic tastes". I don't think it has anything to do with his religion, it just means that he likes all kinds of things, perhaps specifically, all kinds of food and/or drink. It's like when Jesus said "Suffer the little children to come unto me." When I first read that or had it read to me, I thought those poor little children must have been suffering and Jesus wanted to comfort them. Turns out that "suffer" is an old fashioned word that means "allow", and indeed, the RSV translates that passage as "Let the little children come unto me". An old fashioned word for the right to vote is "sufferage", as in "women's sufferage". Our spell checker says I'm wrong, so I looked it up. Sure enough, there is no word "sufferage" in my dictionary, the closest thing being "sufferance". Nevertheless, people have been calling it "sufferage" for a long time, and probably will continue to do so. Dictionary be damned!