Rosh Hashanah has arrived and I couldn’t be more excited, it’s the perfect time to talk about just how ridiculous this holiday is.

This article will not discuss the origins of this holiday, nor any of the myths associated with it. For a nice overview of this “special” day, please visit chabad.org.

Instead, this article will focus on the meaning of this holiday. As we all know, Rosh Hashanah is the start of the civil year in the Hebrew calendar. It is the new year for people, animals, and legal contracts. Jews believe that Rosh Hashanah represents the literal creation of the world, or universe.

And here lies the rub, because according to the Hebrew calendar, man (and woman) have only been around for 5,771 years!!! [as of September 8^th, 2010]

We can skip the entire argument about the creation of the world in seven days and how each day might represent millions (or billions) of years to the Hebrew “God”; frankly this argument is ridiculous and misses the entire point. Those who wish to pursue this argument should pay attention to the following:

The heart of the issue is man. The year number on the Hebrew calendar represents the number of years since the creation of man, calculated by adding up the ages of people in the Bible back to the time of Adam and Eve.[2]

Yes, this number can and has been calculated by several scholars such as Ussher, Bede, Kepler, Lightfoot, and Newton. This is best known as Young Earth Creationism and it puts creation at around, give or take, 4000 BCE.

Now, it is a fact that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, as calculated by modern geology using geochronological methods including radiometric dating (the measure of radioactive decay of materials, such as rock).

To accept that man has been around for only six thousand years is just plain ignorant. It is like saying that the cities of Jericho, Göbekli Tepe, and Çatalhöyük, which show evidence of human settlement dating back to 9000 BCE, never were.

You might be amazed to learn that the paintings in Lascaux, France or Altamira, Spain are also an impossibility, since they date to 30,000 BCE.

Human fossils such as those of Australopithecus Africanus or Homo Erectus are just illusions, since they date to millions of years ago.

And let’s not even mention the dinosaurs, whose extinction is dated to around 65 million years ago.

In fact, those who believe, celebrate and accept the creation of the Earth at only a few thousand years old are in complete denial of evolution, physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology, genomics, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, climatology, dendrochronology and many other fields in science

So, Rosh Hashanah is essentially the celebration that there is a “God” and that he placed man on Earth roughly 6,000 years ago. It’s hard to imagine that despite the Earth’s beautiful and overwhelming history, there are those who insist that this is the day man and woman took their first steps.

Where there is religion, you will most assuredly find ignorance.

For a better understanding of our human origins, please see:

• http://humanorigins.si.edu/
• http://www.becominghuman.org/
• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/

Thanks for reading,

Notes:

1. http://www.chabad.org/holidays/JewishNewYear/template_cdo/aid/4644/jewish/Rosh-Hashanah.htm
2. http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm