I spend some time away from here on programming projects, and what do I find when I return? Fucking hell, this thread is an epic trainwreck.

Let's deal with some of the more flatulent and feculent offerings therein, shall we?

Just because we have no record of egypt being deserted or the nile drying up doesnt mean it didnt happen

And this is where I come in and tell you, straight to your face, that you're talking out of your fucking arse.

The reason is simple. Physical processes leave behind them observational evidence of their occurrence, with some of that evidence being persistent through time. I shouldn't even have to point to the fossil record to establish the operation of this principle, a principle which science has relied upon to provide data for the formulation of hypotheses and theories ever since the inception thereof.

In the case of the Nile, do you realise how fucking huge this river is? It contains several trillion cubic metres of water. It's 3,500 miles long. The idea that a river this large would suddenly cease to contain those several trillion cubic metres of water, on its own requires a plausible physical mechanism for this to occur, especially if said occurrence is postulated to take place rapidly. Furthermore, if the Nile had ever ceased to contain those several trillion cubic metres of water for any length of time, the physical evidence produced by this would be immediately obvious to a trained geologist.

In the meantime, let's deal with the Exodus fiction. And I'll start by expounding an elementary principle, derived from the above, that is informative here. Namely, that in the world of archaeology, much of the material found during an excavation, consists of the garbage people left behind and discarded during their daily lives. Even the most mundane pottery fragments arising from tossing a broken pot into the bin, is useful to a trained archaeologist, because those fragments can be informative about the sort of culture the previous owners belonged to, and, in cases where those fragments bear writing marks, the language of the previous owners, etc. The appearance of discarded items in archaeological excavations is so ubiquitous, that it's practically regarded as a sort of operational law among professional archaeologists.

Now, whenever a text contains statements that humans were occupying a given part of the world, the garbage left behind by those previous occupants is the first thing that archaeologists look for. Because we are a garbage producing species, and a particularly fecund one at that. We and our hominid ancestors have been leaving garbage behind in our wake for 3 million years or so - the stone tools left behind by hominid ancestors are an example of that garbage, either lost or discarded when something better emerged to take its place. The Sumerians left behind them plenty of garbage, along with rather more monumental evidence of their activities, and the same is true of every civilisation that has existed since the dawn thereof. Indeed, we are now starting to leave behind our garbage on other bodies in the Solar System - Mars now has a nice complement of dead spacecraft on its surface, as does Venus and Mercury. The Moon currently plays host to several tons of discarded hardware. We've left a space probe on Titan, that in the fullness of time, will become more of our interplanetary garbage, and the Voyager spacecraft, once they finally shut down and become dead hardware, will be our first pieces of interstellar garbage.

So, whenever a text contains claims that humans were occupying a given region for a significant period of time, the garbage they left behind tells archaeologists a lot about those people, their activities, and their culture. Garbage is, to a trained archaeologist, wonderfully informative. Equally informative, is the absence of garbage, telling the same trained archaeologists that purported "accounts" of human activity in a given region were mythological, not factual, when that garbage fails to materialise despite diligent searches for it.

Now, why is this point apposite here? Simple. If humans are postulated to have resided on a particular piece of land for any length of time, the first question archaeologists ask themselves is "are there corroborating artefacts buried therein?". Because the presence of said artefacts, including the discarded garbage I've spent time covering above, is known to be a reliable indicator that the postulate is correct. As a consequence, failure to find said artefacts, including said discarded garbage, is a powerful indicator that the postulate of human habitation of that land is wrong.

As a corollary, applying this to the entire Exodus tale, what do we find? Let's remind ourselves of the core assertions presented in this tale, namely that a large number of Jewish people spent 40 years wandering around the Sinai Desert. If one delves into that account, and calculates the numbers involved, then that account claims that the best part of a million people were active in that region during this time. As a corollary, if this claim were true, archaeologists can easily verify that claim, by digging up the garbage, examining it in detail, and comparing that garbage to other garbage known to have been left behind by similar people belonging to the same culture, in other places where their presence has been archaeologically verified. Quite simply, a million people active in a given geographical location will leave behind them a lot of garbage for archaeologists to sift through.

Guess what? There's no garbage present in the Sinai Desert dating to that time. The hard evidence that this event happened is quite simply, conspicuous by its deafening absence. If any such garbage had been found, the peer reviewed archaeological literature would have documented this in exquisite detail. Instead, what has been found there, is evidence that the Ancient Egyptians sent out parties intermittently to mine turquoise in the region, details of which are presented here. Indeed, so hostile and inimical to permanent human life, are the conditions in that region, that during the Ptolemaic Period, Egyptian civilisation used the Sinai, specifically the outpost fortress of Tjaru, as a banishment and exile location for criminals, evidence for which was presented as long ago as 1906, by James Henry Breasted, in his monumental documentation of known Egyptian archaeological material at that time. A part of that material is the stela upon which is inscribed the Great Edict of Horemheb. Confirmation of Tjaru's usage for this purpose, as well as a military outpost, in accordance with modern standards of data provenance was provided in 2007, as documented in this scholarly work.

Then, of course, there's the whole "global flood" fantasy, which has been debunked by dozens of different lines of independent evidence. If you want to claim that this was a historical event, then allow me to begin pointing and laughing right now, because I'm aware of at least five lines of evidence, including evidence from marine biology, that tosses this fairy tale into the bin.

Now let's move on to some other polished turds in this trainwreck ...

alot of bible prophecies have seemingly come to pass

This is, quite simply, poppycock.

Take for example, the whole "destruction of Tyre" so-called "prophesy", which fundagelicals claim "came true". Except that it didn't. Because Tyre is still functioning as an extant city, inhabited by tens of thousands of people, and if you want to take a peek at it, you only need fire up Google Maps and view the satellite imagery thereof. Which is handily annotated with the names of a whole host of functioning items of human infrastructure, ranging from cafés and shops to a large hospital. Of course, fundagelicals have an even worse command of basic geography than the typical product of American schooling, which is woefully insular and USA-centric, and as a consequence of many of them being "homeschooled" in environments that would fail even basic tests of educational competence in Europe, most of them can't even point correctly to the UK on a map of the world, let alone any countries that have (gasp) Muslim majority populations. Most of the fundagelicals who swallow this feculent dreck about "prophesy", would be unsafe to let loose on the streets of major European cities without an entourage of trained professionals to stop them getting lost. Plus, the typical fundagelical has NO interest whatsoever in learning about anything that might shatter his precious little religious hologram in the television in his head. Trying to teach these people basic observable facts, is at times like trying to train a rabid wolverine to paint a Pre-Raphaelite canvas.

This is before we confront one embarrassing and inconvenient fact, that the typical fundagelical will gnaw one of his own limbs off before acknowledging the existence of. Namely, that mythology is possibly the least reliable means of disseminating substantive knowledge. And yes, every so-called "holy book" is a mythology. One of the problems extant in mythologies, being that the whole modus operandi of mythological authorship, consists of creating fabulously embellished stories possessing at best a tenuous connection to observational reality, and then presenting said rococo products of the imagination as if they constituted fact. Once again, see the whole "global flood" fantasy for a particularly florid and pathological example.

On the other hand, if you want an example of a "prophesy" that did come true, I give you ... Einstein's prediction that light would change direction when passing alongside massive objects. Which was confirmed in the 1919 Eddington experiment. But then Einstein had sound reasons for issuing that "prophesy", on the basis of what his mathematics was telling him.

Oh, and another issue that haunts mythology, arising directly from the above-described modus operandi, is that it is frequently couched in obscurantist prose, so that even trained scholars sometimes have trouble working out what message the authors thereof intended to disseminate to the world. If your "prophesy" is couched in the contemporary version of word salad, so that people have to exert effort of both research and imagination in order to try and extract a sensible meaning therefrom, then said "prophesy" could mean quite literally anything to anyone. As a corollary, without well-defined and specific dates, places and interactions cited therein, any so-called "prophesy" is totally fucking useless. But of course, on the relatively infrequent occasions when well-defined dates, places and interactions are presented, either in mythologies, or in the more recent vomitings of assorted apocalyptic fantasists (the fundagelicals have thrown up a fair few of these of late), the moment those dates pass, and the interactions asserted to take place in the asserted places don't take place, then all sorts of apologetic excuses are fabricated to try and sweep the embarrassing failure under the carpet, or try and conjure an imaginary "success" out of the failure. I experienced the hilarity of seeing one particularly florid specimen of fundagelical encephalopathy, try and tell me that the "destruction of Tyre" bullshit was real, by pointing to an apologetics video on YouTube that bore more observable holes than a fine Emmental. The extent to which the producers of that video were manifestly making shit up as they went along, became embarrassing to watch after a while, because seeing purportedly grown adult humans make a spectacle of that sort in public ceases to be edifying after a while.

Now, is there anything else I need to do here before taking another coding break with the dreaded Visual Basic for Applications, or can I consider my work done here?