To ask a stupid question? Noah's Ark

Calmomiletea

"The whole purpose of it was to kill everyone who would not repent, I.e. everyone on the earth"

How do you make it work with the newborn babies and for that matter the unborn ones killed when their pregnant mothers drowned.

I remember being taught even back in the 60s that those biblical events could have had natural causes and of course that will be what happened.

But when Christians agree (as they mostly do) then they are admitting that all god's actions were not his at all, but just natural events that the priests used to fool people.

Which is accurate, but I wonder how Christians can handle the contradiction.

Read the Bible. The world lies. God doesn't.

Study geology. The evidence doesn't lie. There was no global flood.

Study biology. There has been no huge wipeout of life during the period of human civilisation. Animals - and humans - do not all descend from a mere boatful. The evidence is in our genes. (Apart from the sheer nonsense of how the marsupials got to Asia Minor and back.)

I wouldn't be so harsh as to say the bible 'lies' (in the case of Noah) - men wrote down a flood story passed down through oral history, made into a myth about why it happened which fitted into the religion they'd developed.

Read the Bible, read the epic of Gilgamesh, read the Greek flood story.

There was no floating magic zoo boat

@Calmomiletea I have read genesis 6. It reads like fantastical mythology rather than factual account. It's as impossible a story as the one about Finn McCool building the Giant's Causeway because he wanted to go and beat up another giant but didn't want to get his feet wet crossing the Irish sea.

Why should we believe the story about Noah's ark but not the one about Finn MacCool?

If you read what I wrote specifically used the word "kind" and not "species".

But what are you claiming here? That kiwis didn't need to go to Israel because another of their kind did and kiwis subsequently evolved from that one? What kind would that be? Flightless birds? Birds in general? Anything that lays eggs? Anything with a spine? Anything that's multicellular?

Presumably there was major flooding over a long period, after the last Ice Age ended, so possibly there were folk memories from way back, which entered into myth. If people were capable of quite sophisticated cave paintings over 30,000 years ago, they were presumably also capable of passing on stories of events they couldn’t explain.

I believe there are credible explanations for other Old Testament stories, e.g. the 7 years of famine in Egypt, which could have been caused by the aftermath (ash wiping out the sun) of that massive volcanic eruption in Greece (I forget the island involved) and an ensuing massive tsunami, which could also have wiped out the Mycenaean culture around 1600 (IIRC) BC.

And the poo. Imagine all the poo 💩

@Stoufer thank you for the book recommendation!

A man definitely didn't put 2 of every animal on a boat. Not probably. Definitely.

It would be impossible to have a world wide flood, there is only so much water on the earth.

As for two of each animal. Well I doubt a couple of each type of penguin would make it 10 000 miles to climb on to an Ark.

And what about aquatic life? Some fish can only live in salt water and some can only live in salt water. A world wide flood would leave all water brackish.

Christianity makes no sense to me. Parts of it do, the basic ‘be a decent human and do as you would be done by’ etc. But all the nonsense about women being subservient and silent can get in the bin. Paul was clearly a woman hating incel.

But back on the topic, imagine the Boxing Day tsunami back two thousand years ago when we barely understood weather and geography. It would have felt like the entire world was flooded because they didn’t know any better.

And that’s why I believe religion has lost its relevance. We didn’t know any better back then so people made up stories. Now we do.

The swimmy things would probably have been OK without the ark. If a bit knackered.

What I don't get, aside from the breeding issues and narrow gene pool you get with only a pair of each animal, is - what about the food chain?
You have two lions, two tigers, two leopards. What do they eat for all that time on the ark? You only have a pair of wildebeest, a pair of antelope etc.

I'm not even going to ask how the tigers were persuaded onto there in the first place!

I find it quite incredible the two penguins walked and swam all the way from Antarctica to Mesopotamia to join Noah. Or did Noah go and get a couple of them. The bible doesn't seem to explain this very well.

And unicorns? Why didn't he save a couple of them?

This sounds similar to present day Marsh Arab dwellings. Or the former dwellings, since Saddam Hussein's regime systematically destroyed the marsh region with the aim of wiping them out.

Fundamentalist Christians take it all literally.

Mainstream Christian denominations fall somewhere along the spectrum of prima scriptura to sole scriptura.

@Besttimelftheyear
Watch Ancient Apocalypse | Netflix Official Site
this was an interesting show and mass flooding was a central part of the series if i remember well.

It was a global flood. Read the account in Genesis 6.

Three quick thoughts on it:

It was a global flood: 1.The whole purpose of it was to kill everyone who would not repent, I.e. everyone on the earth, bar Noah, as he and his family were the only people who feared and loved God. Of everyone else the Bible says 'the thoughts of their hearts were only evil continually'. Noah preached for 120 years warning people and what did they do? They mocked him.

It was a global flood: 2. What was the point of bringing two of every animal on the face of the earth into the ark if the flood wasn't global. The account in Genesis 6 states that the purpose of the flood was to destroy all living creatures on the earth.

It was a global flood: 3. God does not break His promises. He cannot because He IS Truth itself. He made a covenant that He would not globally flood the earth again. That was the whole point of the rainbow. We wouldn't be here if God hadn't shown mercy to Noah and his family.

This is not an exhaustive list. Read the Bible. The world lies. God doesn't.

And let's not talk about all the other brutal genocides and kidnappings and virgin rapes that the good Lord God Yaweh ordered. The seige of Jericho was a lot of fun, wasn't it? What a catchy song. Just a shame about all the slaughtered children.

Modern day breeding programmes for endangered species have failed despite all the science and interventions. I highly doubt a guy thousands of years ago on a wooden boat presumably with no food and surrounded by diseased flood water would have had much success.

And why do you think that is ?

But surely you realise that a year of studying a subject hardly scratches the surface of the whole of that subject? Did you also study geology which would be far more pertinent to the formation of the canyon? As to its age rather than shortening it to mere thousands of years in recent times scientists have questioned whether it isn't millions of years older than previously thought.

The last is very much the difference between science and the sort of pseudo science that looks to create evidence that the old testament is all real. Scientists are aware that knowledge isn't static, we discover more and that can change our understanding of things we thought to be a fact. Pseudo biblical "scientists" use biblical stories and scant research or evidence to attempt to create a monolithic "truth" that is never changing.

Not every bit of the bible was supposed to taken as a true and accurate history. You can be a faithful believer and know that. You can find every chapter and verse of the bible important and know that. There are very few people who will take you seriously if you insist it's all true not least because some of it is contradictory. I'm sure this doesn't matter to you and I get it, just because you're in the minority doesn't mean the majority is right all the time. Sometimes, however, it is the majority who are on the right track and just about everything points to this being one of those times.

David was a historical figure.

A lot of people think Moses was a real person but there aren't really any other records to say so - but that's about what you would expect. But the way he is written about is rather different from Noah.

From a big picture perspective, everyone dies no matter what, the Old Testament is largely a playing out of what that means. Humans become separated from the source of life by embracing untruths, and then they begin to die. Abel and Cain, and the flood, are kind of a continuation of that story, evil behaviour just gets worse and worse. Even Moses giving people rules doesn't do the trick. Trying to pick out the few honest people (Abraham, Noah, etc) doesn't do it. None of their attempts at politics fixes it. The priests don't fix it.

It's a dark story because it reflects the human experience.