While I am sympathetic to the view that religion should not have influence on politics, the first amendment is pretty much just thin disestablishmentarian  and doesn't really reflect secularism in the Continental European/French sense of the word. Religion is relegated to the sphere of civil society by the first amendment. Secularism, in the French sense, also wanted to eliminate much of the civil society influence of religion too, but the first amendment doesn't go that far. 

A secularist (rather than thin disestablishmentarian) first amendment probably wouldn't have passed given that the nascent U.S was about to enter the Second Great Awakening. 

True, there's no evidence, only a lot of inconsistencies in the stories

For example

If you start with the assumption that an Exodus occurred, then one is bound to find some likely date. You have begged the question and supported a gigantic fiction. One might as well ask what the exact date was than Captain Ahab harpooned Moby Dick. The probability that an Exodus occurred in 1186 BCE vanishes in comparison to the probability that no Exodus occurred at all. All of the archaeological and linguistic evidence shows that the Israelites developed peacefully in Canaan as Canaanite — there was no sojourn in Egypt, there was no Moses, there was no Exodus, and there was no conquering war. It’s all just a nice story book, like Moby Dick.

That view is supported of course by the impossibility of fixing a date, with estimates ranging from 1600 BCE to 1100 BCE, along with the utter absence of any evidence of Israelite slaves in ancient Egypt, and the absence of any archaeological evidence in Sinai. If Mount Sinai was a real place, where is it? Why was the site not preserved and revered? Why has it not been a site of pilgrimage for Jews for 3,000 years not to mention modern tourism?

But the big problem is that your date is nonsensical in the general chronology of Genesis and Exodus. If the Israelites left Egypt around 1186 BCE, that means that they entered Egypt around 1586 BCE. But that is impossible because Abraham, from Ur, was said to be a Chaldean (according to Genesis) or a Sumerian assuming he predated the Chaldeans. The Chaldeans did not exist until 900 BCE at the earliest, so you have Moses predating Abraham. On the other hand, if Abraham was born in Sumer, then he dated to before 2000 BCE and standard estimates similar to yours put him at about 2200 BCE. But if that was the date of Abraham then you are suggesting that four generations of his family spanned 600 years. That, of course, is impossible under any chronology. The whole thing is just an absurdity.


So more likely is Israelites and Palestinians lived together peacefully as Canaanites until the Philistines showed up and later the Romans. Both Jews and Muslims continued to live in the area peacefully until the 1900s when Zionist immigration began.

David either never conquered Jerusalem or conquered it from his own people...

2 Sam 5:6-10 David captures Jerusalem from the fiercely independent Canaanite tribe of Jebusites in c.1004BC.

Jebusites being Canaanites that lived in Jerusalem.

Ancient propaganda!



Anyway typical for an American president to cite the bible as a right to claim to land...

 

Who Were The Ancient Israelites and Where Did They Come From? By William Dever is a book I read 17 years ago. But yeah you are right. Anyone that thinks the Old Testament is history hasn't paid attention to modern scholars at all. Even Christian Apologists regularly try to downplay the Exodus as "an allegory" or "not intended to be taken literally".

Could y'all start a Israel vs Palestine thread so that we can learn more about this? I'm really wanting to dig into it, because i've got people from the region in my family. This is so interesting but it's just gonna get lost in the sea of Trump posts. So please start a new thread on this and lets talk about it there.

I am not sure a message board is the best place to learn about it, but there is a thread here.

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/247941/israel-hamas-war-gaza-genocide/430/#7