[DugwayDuke]

If one believes Exodus never happened and one believes Moses never existed, then one can then do away with those pesky Ten Commandments. One can also do away with the concept of Israel as a nation. Aren't the "conservative" jews the ones in favor of negotiating with the Arabs?

[goldstategop]

PC took over Reform Judaism and much of Conservative Judaism as well. Basically what you have here is Conservative Jews admitting the Torah is a hoax and God is a liar who tricked the Jews into believing a made up fairy tale. The only thing I'm surprised at is they haven't stopped celebrating Jewish holidays, liturgy, keeping kashrut, and davening on Shabbat and the High Holidays. I mean if its all a lie, what's the point of being a Jew in the first place? So much for men of the cloth being able to believe in their faith and convey it to the laity. In these days of PC, to quote from the Good Book itself, "every man doeth what seems right in his own eyes."

[Starrgaizr]

If one believes Exodus never happened and one believes Moses never existed...

The article does a poor job at explaining the complexity of the theological issues. It seems to be written by a secularist who believes that the only logical alternatives are that every word of the bible is literally given by God to Moses or that the bible is only a primitive "mythology" that perhaps contains important lessons for us today (written in a patronizing tone suggesting only primitive people need the myths). But even if intervening humans transmitted the bible until its text became fixed, the secularist bias is apparent in the assumption that God could play no role in that process.

In any event, there is a lesson in the Passover seder service, in which we teach children that we must create the mindset that we, too, personally were slaves in Egypt and were freed from bondage by God. Our lives are not to be lived differently because we personally did not happen to have been born in slavery. So, what if there was only one Jew ever taken into slavery in Egypt (does anyone believe that no single Jew was ever, for any reason, made a slave???)and the rest is embellishment? It makes no difference. God wants us to personally identify with slavery and credit God for our freedom. For thousands of years Jews have been adopting this mindset.

Historical honesty and truth are important, but it is a mistake to think that the legitimacy of one's religion or the truth of divine presence in one's sacred books hinges on the findings of archeologists.