I have a bunch to say (grew up in an orthodox jewish community and rejected it + debated A LOT of apologists at an orthodox Jewish seminary as an atheist).
1) First off, you may wanna check out Richard Elliot Friedman’s book entitled Who Wrote the Bible -- it’s very accessible, and I thought very good. He has a discussion about how the tabernacle in the Jewish temple closely resembles structure in Egypt (without resembling any structures of the canaanites), which he thinks (for that and a few other reasons) is good evidence to at least think that the Levite class of Jews actually having an exodus from Egypt.
2) In regards to the chosen people, there are many interpretations of how this actually works, and it’s not clear they get more moral weight because of it. Some rabbis just believe that they have different duties - are supposed to get the rest of the world to follow the Noahide laws.
3) There are other morally repugnant things in the Torah -- God telling the jews to kill everyone - you can find a few examples of this online.
4) You should actually look at what the Torah says with regards to all the Jews hearing God at Mount Sinai -- it’s really not clear, but it was later interpreted to mean that they did (by Maimonidies, for example). Perhaps it would make sense that they didn’t have to make the claim originally but, years later, it developed into that claim.
5) There are a few instances in the Torah where the people forget a lot of the laws and later come back to them -- 1) after the Babylonian exile with Ezra and Nechemia, 2) Josiah “found” a Torah in the Temple after it was destroyed and realized that they were doing everything wrong and need to go back on the path. These might have been where new stories were introduced.
6) More methodological - this argument just relies on a ton of premises - mostly empirical/ historical clauims that seems really difficult to quantify and very uncertain. Giving the diminishing probabilities of the conclusion after a bunch of uncertain premises, you should lead to a very uncertain conclusion.
7) It’s quite strange that such a small religion would do so well -- especially given that they don’t missionize! This seems very weird for a false religion.
5) I think the right interpretation of those, as Tyron Goldschmidt argues, is that the Jews fell prey to syncretism, not that they ever forgot the old traditions.
6) Which argument?
8) Agreed--I was arguing for a pretty liberal Judaism.
I agree with most of this, except (shockingly) the part about Christianity contradicting the Hebrew Bible.
- I don't agree that the Shema contradicts the Trinity: it just asserts monotheism, and Christians are monotheists. One could claim that the Shema asserts unitarianism, but that's clearly question-begging.
- The claim that "God would not fear himself" seems very weak. The New Testament describes Jesus as obedient to God (Philippians 2:6-8), and Jesus himself refers to the Father as "my God and your God" (John 20:17), a mere eleven verses before he himself is called God (John 20:28)!
- Christians generally don't think that Ezekiel 46 is about the Messiah. That's one of the problems with arguments from prophecy: what counts as a prophecy often depends on who you ask! An obvious example of this is the Suffering Servant songs in Isaiah: Christians have historically interpreted them as messianic, while Jews (largely in response to Christian interpretations) have tended to interpret them as referring to the Jewish people as a whole.
You have to read Richard Lynn's book "The Chosen People". You could make your case 3 even much stronger. Lynn is a controversial author but this book is just amazing. He details the very disproportionate intellectual achievements of the (ashkenazi) jewish people in a rigorous and systematic way, it's so interesting.
Have you read the guide for The Perplexed? Maimonides writes Judaism for philosophers. He always suggests that other peoples had received their own prophecies. You cannot steel man Judaism without steelmaning the idea that religious universalism is bad. In Maimonides is clear that god speaks to all peoples, that divine inspiration and human reason to some extent overlap, and the Jewish faith is primus inter pares. Probably a useful theology to be in good terms with the ruling Muslims…
Not gonna lie -- I really don’t think this is a worthwhile read in terms of trying to steelman Judaims -- maybe for understanding the theology but im not sure you need to start with this text, as its long and difficult for no reason.
The fourth class includes the precepts relating to charity, loans, gifts and the like (...) The object of these precepts is clear; their benefit concerns all people by turn; for he who is rich today may one day become poor; and he, who is now poor, he himself or his son may be rich tomorrow”
Moshe Maimonides, “The Guide for the Perplexed”, Ch.XXXV
This is a modern defense of Welfare state, in a XIII century text. Social democratic Jews are an old tradition…
There is fascinating literature on “Game theory on the Talmud”, where the Economics Prize winner R. Aummann is main contributor:
Perhaps too long, this is a paper on the thorny issue of gentiles on the Messianic age. Remember that Maimonides suggested the possibility of Messiah to be a metaphor of Israel among nations, not a person.
I think when people say there’s something out there they don’t literally mean something. You’re being too autistically literal there. They probably don’t have the words to express exactly what they mean but I think they mean something like “there’s some transcendent part of reality beyond the matter of the universe”
I don't know what that means. Is it just that something nonphysical exists? If so, I agree, but I don't know what type of nonphysical thing they think exists.
I’m not sure they have a really coherent idea of what exactly they believe in. If you press them, probably that there is some sort of ultimate meaning/purpose, supernatural force or “higher power”.
This sort of belief heavily overlaps with what a lot of irreligious people in the US think. Most aren’t full-on atheists.
What's your ranking on the likelihood of the four major religions conditional on God existing? (excluding Buddhism because it doesn't require the supernatural to be meaningfully true) You've mentioned P(Islam) <<< MIN(P(Christianity),P(Hinduism),P(Judaism), any particular ranking on the other three?
Bentham, I love you bro, but you should excise the "Christianity contradicts the Torah" part. It just reeks of the standard Arian illiteracy when eisegeting those verses (Numbers 23:19? Seriously?). Not to call you an Arian or illiterate (you are hardly the first to utilize these verses) but they're very, very bad arguments when you read them in context and are familiar with the claims of Christian theology.
Same with the comments on the Christian doctrine of atonement. Look, it may seem strange or odd or bewilderingly complex to you, but, to me, someone familiar with, at least, the very basics of Christian doctrine, it doesn't. I find it to be comfortingly simple, in fact.
> fought several different attacking armies over and over again, and became the free-est and most Democratic country in the Middle East by an order of magnitude. If that’s not evidence of the favor of God playing a role, I don’t know what is!
"Divine Wind", or other repeated "acts of god", would seem like stronger evidence to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze_(typhoon). Imagine a world where God regularly smites your enemies, but not his favored people, during wars. Surely that's much less ambiguous evidence for God.
More broadly, your implicit position here is that evidence of God's will comes from "The Lord helps those who helps themselves", where people who are unusually good at helping themselves are seen as evidence of God's workings, whereas I (and I imagine, most people who talk about miracles) would be more inclined to believe that statistically unlikely (natural) events will be more evidence.
There are convincing (to me) arguments that the Torah doesn’t take numbers literally, they are always there to convey some other message. A clear example of this is the “70 souls” that go down to Egypt, whose names are enumerated. But they are nearly all men! There are some women included, so it’s clearly not just counting men, but an implausibly small number. It’s clear it’s cherry picking to get to the number it wants.
It seems you're steelmanning Judaism by allowing for an errant bible. I'm curious whether you think it possible to steelman an argument that includes an inerrant bible.
It seems that you are specifically steelmanning Judaism, as distinct from Jewish arguments for Judaism.
What about this objection: According to the Jewish scriptures, Jews are supposed to worship in a Temple in Jerusalem. But there hasn’t been a Temple for 2000 years and the religion has had to adapt to that. This doesn’t look like ’success’ based on the criteria of the scriptures.
This is also an argument in favor of Christianity. Jesus claims to be the perfect sacrifice, rendering animal sacrifices obsolete. Soon after, the temple is destroyed, never to be rebuilt (thereby stopping the Jewish animal sacrifices). What are the odds?
By the way you say Jews weren’t persecuted in the Golden Age of Spain but that term commonly refers to Catholic Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, when they were driven out of Spain.
1) The Kuzari argument relies on there having been a large number of Israelites. Not necessarily 600,000, but a lot. If there were only a thousand the whole argument falls apart.
2) There have been loads of Jewish schisms. Karaites, Christians, Sadducees, Samaritans, Zionism, Sabbateanism. Orthodox Jews don't regard Reform as a branch of Judaism at all (Conservative is a bit more complicated, though in practice it's the same). Per capita, it appears to have more schisms that Christianity does.
3) 'Jews' don't win a lot of Nobel prizes. Ashkenazi Jews do, specifically secular ones (and in most cases they aren't even Reform or whatever). Kind of a funny proof of the Jewish religion.
1) Because the whole argument is premised on it being hard to convince large numbers of people that something fake happened. You can easily convince a thousand people. Cults do that all the time.
2) Karaites was 500 years (and there are few still around today), Samaritans going on for 2000 years. Reform and Zionism, we don't know yet. Even Sabbateanism which was totally cracked in the head lasted 200 years. Christianity definitely didn't start as a separate religion, and the fact that it developed into one hardly proves that Judaism has some kind of inherent anti-schism power. I didn't even mention groups like Breslev and Chabad that are basically accepted withing in Orthodox though they really shouldn't be and will have t be kicked out in due course.
3) I agree it's surprising, but I don't see how it's less surprising on the hypothesis that Judaism is true. One way you could argue it is that maybe G-d wanted to bring the Jews back to Israel, and so he made Ashkenazi Jews smart so they could pull off Zionism against incredible odds, only to be outbred by Sephardim and watch helplessly as the country they built was turned into a turdbucket. But an argument like this would require a pretty strong commitment to a fairly politicised providential view of history.
1) It's not about it being hard to convince lots of people. It's premised on it being hard to convince a nation that something happened to their ancestors, was witnessed by all their ancestors, and was continually passed down.
2) As I say, they're mostly defunct. Reform Jews aren't different theologically, they just disagree about how seriously to take it.
3) If God has a plan for the Jews and they're Gods chosen people, one would expect them to be especially successful.
1) Factually, it is based on this. I've read the Kuzari, and according to every presentation except yours this is the lynchpin of the argument. If it was just 1,000 people they could have just been persuaded it happened when it didn't. Hell, they probably could have just made it up.
2) First of all, you said they 'quicky collapsed' which is not true in even one of these cases. Secondly, how does the fact that most of the schisms burned themselves out over 3,000 years mean that Judaism has some divine anti-schism protection? Right now, over 80% of Jews are in schismatic movements, or completely unobservant!
Reform Jews are totally rejected by observant Jews. If a Reform Jew touched my wine, I would throw it down the sink and I am not in any way an extreme guy in context. Are you unaware of this? Do you know about the 13 principles accepted as obligatory in Orthodox Judaism?
3) Like I say, this doesn't seem persuasive without some presentation of what the plan is. Is the plan 'make a lot of money in Hollywood then intermarry'?
1) You are confused! Even an exodus with just a few thousand people would meet the Kuzari criteria.
2) They did quickly collapse in the span of history. Within a few hundred years they were defunct. In the span of a several thousand year history, that's quick. Judaism hasn't schizmed, people just don't take it seriously. But the Torah predicts that, describing Jews turning away from the faith repeatedly.
3) No, but God picking an especially successful batch of people who succeed across many domains is to be expected.
1) No, you are confused, and objectively ignorant.
2) I don't believe that you even believe what you are writing at this point, unless you are drunk. What kind of schism would you accept as being a counter-indication of Judaism?
3) I don't see it. Again, it's not 'Jews', it's Ashkenazi Jews, specifically Ashkenazi Jews who don't keep Judaism. I mean, Chassidim in America are pretty rich too, but it would be a stretch to say they have succeeded in many domains.
Aztlan myth has the ancestors of the Aztecs talking to a God who demands they change their name. If in some versions he demanded sacrifices or other stuff it might be a counterexample.
What premodern examples of things that fit the Kuzari criteria exist? To me, it looks like the Kuzari criteria are gerrymandered to include the events described in the Tanakh, and then a bunch of recent things that would never be subject to historical doubt for obvious reasons.
I don’t see how nearly any premodern war or conquest or expulsion would be seen as embarrassing or making a universal demand on a people in the 21st century (assuming that Goldschmidt’s added criteria are at play, which to me are the gerrymandered ones). Only ones mythologized to do so like in the Torah are. If we exclude those extra gerrymandered criteria, it seems to me a number of probably false national myths would meet the OG Kuzari argument. The Xia dynasty, for example, probably didn’t happen in anything but perhaps the most barebones sense, yet it (in my opinion) meets the first three criteria.
Yep, the defense can also be used in favor of modern conspiracy theories like QAnon or UFO abductions. BB voice: "What's the prior probability that this group of people claimed they were abducted by aliens... WHILE THERE WERE REPORTS OF UNIDENTIFIED LIGHTS IN THE SKY?" I don't get what's supposed to be unlikely about cases like these. People propagate batshit crazy lies for extended periods of time everywhere in history. And of course the more successful lies are going to be the ones that purport there's a bit of circumstantial evidence NOBODY has disproved, like the Mayans predicting some eclipse so they had to have known the world is going to end, or the pyramids in Egypt having this weird coordinate value so somebody must have traveled back in time to give them modern technology to build the pyramids because ancient Egyptians couldn't have known about our modern coordinate system.
I have a bunch to say (grew up in an orthodox jewish community and rejected it + debated A LOT of apologists at an orthodox Jewish seminary as an atheist).
1) First off, you may wanna check out Richard Elliot Friedman’s book entitled Who Wrote the Bible -- it’s very accessible, and I thought very good. He has a discussion about how the tabernacle in the Jewish temple closely resembles structure in Egypt (without resembling any structures of the canaanites), which he thinks (for that and a few other reasons) is good evidence to at least think that the Levite class of Jews actually having an exodus from Egypt.
2) In regards to the chosen people, there are many interpretations of how this actually works, and it’s not clear they get more moral weight because of it. Some rabbis just believe that they have different duties - are supposed to get the rest of the world to follow the Noahide laws.
3) There are other morally repugnant things in the Torah -- God telling the jews to kill everyone - you can find a few examples of this online.
4) You should actually look at what the Torah says with regards to all the Jews hearing God at Mount Sinai -- it’s really not clear, but it was later interpreted to mean that they did (by Maimonidies, for example). Perhaps it would make sense that they didn’t have to make the claim originally but, years later, it developed into that claim.
5) There are a few instances in the Torah where the people forget a lot of the laws and later come back to them -- 1) after the Babylonian exile with Ezra and Nechemia, 2) Josiah “found” a Torah in the Temple after it was destroyed and realized that they were doing everything wrong and need to go back on the path. These might have been where new stories were introduced.
6) More methodological - this argument just relies on a ton of premises - mostly empirical/ historical clauims that seems really difficult to quantify and very uncertain. Giving the diminishing probabilities of the conclusion after a bunch of uncertain premises, you should lead to a very uncertain conclusion.
7) It’s quite strange that such a small religion would do so well -- especially given that they don’t missionize! This seems very weird for a false religion.
8) There are various points at which there is good reason to think that Moses was not the author of the Torah https://www.thetorah.com/article/who-wrote-the-torah-according-to-the-torah.
More things to be said, but this is a start.
3) Right, I was suggesting that Torah erred.
4) Interesting, I'll give that a look.
5) I think the right interpretation of those, as Tyron Goldschmidt argues, is that the Jews fell prey to syncretism, not that they ever forgot the old traditions.
6) Which argument?
8) Agreed--I was arguing for a pretty liberal Judaism.
I agree with most of this, except (shockingly) the part about Christianity contradicting the Hebrew Bible.
- I don't agree that the Shema contradicts the Trinity: it just asserts monotheism, and Christians are monotheists. One could claim that the Shema asserts unitarianism, but that's clearly question-begging.
- The claim that "God would not fear himself" seems very weak. The New Testament describes Jesus as obedient to God (Philippians 2:6-8), and Jesus himself refers to the Father as "my God and your God" (John 20:17), a mere eleven verses before he himself is called God (John 20:28)!
- Christians generally don't think that Ezekiel 46 is about the Messiah. That's one of the problems with arguments from prophecy: what counts as a prophecy often depends on who you ask! An obvious example of this is the Suffering Servant songs in Isaiah: Christians have historically interpreted them as messianic, while Jews (largely in response to Christian interpretations) have tended to interpret them as referring to the Jewish people as a whole.
‘The trinity runs counter the claim in Deuteronomy 6:4 that, "Hear Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is one."’
🤯
Mans just proved Christianity wrong! Boom
You have to read Richard Lynn's book "The Chosen People". You could make your case 3 even much stronger. Lynn is a controversial author but this book is just amazing. He details the very disproportionate intellectual achievements of the (ashkenazi) jewish people in a rigorous and systematic way, it's so interesting.
Joshua Berman enumerates many other exodus details that would only have been known to someone who was actually familiar with a specific period of Egyptian culture: https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/history-ideas/2015/03/was-there-an-exodus/
Have you read the guide for The Perplexed? Maimonides writes Judaism for philosophers. He always suggests that other peoples had received their own prophecies. You cannot steel man Judaism without steelmaning the idea that religious universalism is bad. In Maimonides is clear that god speaks to all peoples, that divine inspiration and human reason to some extent overlap, and the Jewish faith is primus inter pares. Probably a useful theology to be in good terms with the ruling Muslims…
I have not.
Not gonna lie -- I really don’t think this is a worthwhile read in terms of trying to steelman Judaims -- maybe for understanding the theology but im not sure you need to start with this text, as its long and difficult for no reason.
I love above all this:
The fourth class includes the precepts relating to charity, loans, gifts and the like (...) The object of these precepts is clear; their benefit concerns all people by turn; for he who is rich today may one day become poor; and he, who is now poor, he himself or his son may be rich tomorrow”
Moshe Maimonides, “The Guide for the Perplexed”, Ch.XXXV
This is a modern defense of Welfare state, in a XIII century text. Social democratic Jews are an old tradition…
There is fascinating literature on “Game theory on the Talmud”, where the Economics Prize winner R. Aummann is main contributor:
http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~raumann/pdf/Game%20Theory%20in%20the%20Talmud%20BI.pdf
Perhaps too long, this is a paper on the thorny issue of gentiles on the Messianic age. Remember that Maimonides suggested the possibility of Messiah to be a metaphor of Israel among nations, not a person.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781618117892-003/html?lang=en
I think when people say there’s something out there they don’t literally mean something. You’re being too autistically literal there. They probably don’t have the words to express exactly what they mean but I think they mean something like “there’s some transcendent part of reality beyond the matter of the universe”
I don't know what that means. Is it just that something nonphysical exists? If so, I agree, but I don't know what type of nonphysical thing they think exists.
I’m not sure they have a really coherent idea of what exactly they believe in. If you press them, probably that there is some sort of ultimate meaning/purpose, supernatural force or “higher power”.
This sort of belief heavily overlaps with what a lot of irreligious people in the US think. Most aren’t full-on atheists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ietsism
Bentham, how would you compare the plausibility of Karaite Judaism to that of Rabbinic Judaism?
What's your ranking on the likelihood of the four major religions conditional on God existing? (excluding Buddhism because it doesn't require the supernatural to be meaningfully true) You've mentioned P(Islam) <<< MIN(P(Christianity),P(Hinduism),P(Judaism), any particular ranking on the other three?
Bentham, I love you bro, but you should excise the "Christianity contradicts the Torah" part. It just reeks of the standard Arian illiteracy when eisegeting those verses (Numbers 23:19? Seriously?). Not to call you an Arian or illiterate (you are hardly the first to utilize these verses) but they're very, very bad arguments when you read them in context and are familiar with the claims of Christian theology.
Same with the comments on the Christian doctrine of atonement. Look, it may seem strange or odd or bewilderingly complex to you, but, to me, someone familiar with, at least, the very basics of Christian doctrine, it doesn't. I find it to be comfortingly simple, in fact.
> fought several different attacking armies over and over again, and became the free-est and most Democratic country in the Middle East by an order of magnitude. If that’s not evidence of the favor of God playing a role, I don’t know what is!
"Divine Wind", or other repeated "acts of god", would seem like stronger evidence to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze_(typhoon). Imagine a world where God regularly smites your enemies, but not his favored people, during wars. Surely that's much less ambiguous evidence for God.
More broadly, your implicit position here is that evidence of God's will comes from "The Lord helps those who helps themselves", where people who are unusually good at helping themselves are seen as evidence of God's workings, whereas I (and I imagine, most people who talk about miracles) would be more inclined to believe that statistically unlikely (natural) events will be more evidence.
There are convincing (to me) arguments that the Torah doesn’t take numbers literally, they are always there to convey some other message. A clear example of this is the “70 souls” that go down to Egypt, whose names are enumerated. But they are nearly all men! There are some women included, so it’s clearly not just counting men, but an implausibly small number. It’s clear it’s cherry picking to get to the number it wants.
It seems you're steelmanning Judaism by allowing for an errant bible. I'm curious whether you think it possible to steelman an argument that includes an inerrant bible.
It seems that you are specifically steelmanning Judaism, as distinct from Jewish arguments for Judaism.
Thanks for an interesting post.
What about this objection: According to the Jewish scriptures, Jews are supposed to worship in a Temple in Jerusalem. But there hasn’t been a Temple for 2000 years and the religion has had to adapt to that. This doesn’t look like ’success’ based on the criteria of the scriptures.
This is also an argument in favor of Christianity. Jesus claims to be the perfect sacrifice, rendering animal sacrifices obsolete. Soon after, the temple is destroyed, never to be rebuilt (thereby stopping the Jewish animal sacrifices). What are the odds?
Well Deuteronomy predicts pretty severe ruin of the Jewish nation.
So you are arguing that Judaism is true because the Jewish people are successful and also not successful?
They're successful in that they achieve a lot, but not successful in that they face many external obstacles.
But you seem to be measuring success in secular terms not religious terms.
Well we do better on religious criteria as well--Jews follow the Torah more than any other group! But those are more trivial.
By the way you say Jews weren’t persecuted in the Golden Age of Spain but that term commonly refers to Catholic Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, when they were driven out of Spain.
A few comments:
1) The Kuzari argument relies on there having been a large number of Israelites. Not necessarily 600,000, but a lot. If there were only a thousand the whole argument falls apart.
2) There have been loads of Jewish schisms. Karaites, Christians, Sadducees, Samaritans, Zionism, Sabbateanism. Orthodox Jews don't regard Reform as a branch of Judaism at all (Conservative is a bit more complicated, though in practice it's the same). Per capita, it appears to have more schisms that Christianity does.
3) 'Jews' don't win a lot of Nobel prizes. Ashkenazi Jews do, specifically secular ones (and in most cases they aren't even Reform or whatever). Kind of a funny proof of the Jewish religion.
1) Why?
2) Most of these quickly collapsed. Christians aren't Jews, by their own admission.
3) Still surprising.
1) Because the whole argument is premised on it being hard to convince large numbers of people that something fake happened. You can easily convince a thousand people. Cults do that all the time.
2) Karaites was 500 years (and there are few still around today), Samaritans going on for 2000 years. Reform and Zionism, we don't know yet. Even Sabbateanism which was totally cracked in the head lasted 200 years. Christianity definitely didn't start as a separate religion, and the fact that it developed into one hardly proves that Judaism has some kind of inherent anti-schism power. I didn't even mention groups like Breslev and Chabad that are basically accepted withing in Orthodox though they really shouldn't be and will have t be kicked out in due course.
3) I agree it's surprising, but I don't see how it's less surprising on the hypothesis that Judaism is true. One way you could argue it is that maybe G-d wanted to bring the Jews back to Israel, and so he made Ashkenazi Jews smart so they could pull off Zionism against incredible odds, only to be outbred by Sephardim and watch helplessly as the country they built was turned into a turdbucket. But an argument like this would require a pretty strong commitment to a fairly politicised providential view of history.
1) It's not about it being hard to convince lots of people. It's premised on it being hard to convince a nation that something happened to their ancestors, was witnessed by all their ancestors, and was continually passed down.
2) As I say, they're mostly defunct. Reform Jews aren't different theologically, they just disagree about how seriously to take it.
3) If God has a plan for the Jews and they're Gods chosen people, one would expect them to be especially successful.
1) Factually, it is based on this. I've read the Kuzari, and according to every presentation except yours this is the lynchpin of the argument. If it was just 1,000 people they could have just been persuaded it happened when it didn't. Hell, they probably could have just made it up.
2) First of all, you said they 'quicky collapsed' which is not true in even one of these cases. Secondly, how does the fact that most of the schisms burned themselves out over 3,000 years mean that Judaism has some divine anti-schism protection? Right now, over 80% of Jews are in schismatic movements, or completely unobservant!
Reform Jews are totally rejected by observant Jews. If a Reform Jew touched my wine, I would throw it down the sink and I am not in any way an extreme guy in context. Are you unaware of this? Do you know about the 13 principles accepted as obligatory in Orthodox Judaism?
3) Like I say, this doesn't seem persuasive without some presentation of what the plan is. Is the plan 'make a lot of money in Hollywood then intermarry'?
1) You are confused! Even an exodus with just a few thousand people would meet the Kuzari criteria.
2) They did quickly collapse in the span of history. Within a few hundred years they were defunct. In the span of a several thousand year history, that's quick. Judaism hasn't schizmed, people just don't take it seriously. But the Torah predicts that, describing Jews turning away from the faith repeatedly.
3) No, but God picking an especially successful batch of people who succeed across many domains is to be expected.
1) No, you are confused, and objectively ignorant.
2) I don't believe that you even believe what you are writing at this point, unless you are drunk. What kind of schism would you accept as being a counter-indication of Judaism?
3) I don't see it. Again, it's not 'Jews', it's Ashkenazi Jews, specifically Ashkenazi Jews who don't keep Judaism. I mean, Chassidim in America are pretty rich too, but it would be a stretch to say they have succeeded in many domains.
There are no counterexamples to the Kuzari principle.
Aztlan myth has the ancestors of the Aztecs talking to a God who demands they change their name. If in some versions he demanded sacrifices or other stuff it might be a counterexample.
There are lots of other examples of things meeting the Kuzari criteria--all the other examples happen to be true.
What premodern examples of things that fit the Kuzari criteria exist? To me, it looks like the Kuzari criteria are gerrymandered to include the events described in the Tanakh, and then a bunch of recent things that would never be subject to historical doubt for obvious reasons.
Most major wars and conquests and expulsions will meet these criteria.
I don’t see how nearly any premodern war or conquest or expulsion would be seen as embarrassing or making a universal demand on a people in the 21st century (assuming that Goldschmidt’s added criteria are at play, which to me are the gerrymandered ones). Only ones mythologized to do so like in the Torah are. If we exclude those extra gerrymandered criteria, it seems to me a number of probably false national myths would meet the OG Kuzari argument. The Xia dynasty, for example, probably didn’t happen in anything but perhaps the most barebones sense, yet it (in my opinion) meets the first three criteria.
Yep, the defense can also be used in favor of modern conspiracy theories like QAnon or UFO abductions. BB voice: "What's the prior probability that this group of people claimed they were abducted by aliens... WHILE THERE WERE REPORTS OF UNIDENTIFIED LIGHTS IN THE SKY?" I don't get what's supposed to be unlikely about cases like these. People propagate batshit crazy lies for extended periods of time everywhere in history. And of course the more successful lies are going to be the ones that purport there's a bit of circumstantial evidence NOBODY has disproved, like the Mayans predicting some eclipse so they had to have known the world is going to end, or the pyramids in Egypt having this weird coordinate value so somebody must have traveled back in time to give them modern technology to build the pyramids because ancient Egyptians couldn't have known about our modern coordinate system.