Doctor X

They were passed over. . . .

--J.D.

mindaika

Plus the Hebrew god whacked a bunch of their children. I'd be pissed too...

Gawen

LMAO...good pun

Doctor X

I appreciate the opportunity to puntificate. . . .

Anyways, on a more serious note, one of the major problems with trying to make biblical mythology "real" is the severe lack of evidence. As with the tread on the Parting of the Red Sea, did the Egyptians just "fail to notice" the death of their children, the sudden loss of so many slaves . . . or a global flood?

[Engage Eddie Izzard voice.--Ed.] Right. Really? When? Last weekend?

I wish I could remember the poster who calculated the VOLUME of water necessary for said flood--and then calculated how it would flatten the surface of the earth. The figure "11 ft/s" sticks in my mind like a . . . sticky thing.

Yet the Egyptians kept building those pyramids. . . .

--J.D.

Weltall

I don't know about anyone here, but Talk Origins has a page on the Flood myth and I found another site that went through some of the mathematics here:http://www.holysmoke.org/cretins/fludmath.htm. Not only did the Egyptians and Chinese not notice when the world was covered in water, but apparently they also failed to notice that they didn't have any oxygen to breath once the waters receeded. I imagine a conversation going something like this:
Reporter: So your civilization was wiped out by a flood that covered the entire earth right? Why are you still around?
Egyptian: [Monty Python Voice] We got better.

Doctor X

Oh Ye of Little Faith!!!

The SAME deity that got both platypus . . . platypuses . . . platypussies . . . platypusi . . . wierd duck-mammals to make it all the way from Australia to WhereverthefuckNoahlived, Middle East . . . and got them back . . . who allowed all of the water to fall without flattening every mountain . . . and made it disappear without a trace . . . CAUSED the Heathens . . . I mean . . . Egyptians and Chinese NOT TO NOTICE. . . .

All things are possible if you have faith. . . .

--J. "I Have this Bridge" D.

Jayhawker Soule

... an understatement of near Biblical proportions.

Godless Wonder

My big question about the flood is this: supposing the flood is not meant to be taken literally, but meant to be taken figuratively. Ok, what does it mean then? What is the point of the story? Why is it in there?

Looking at it, the story of the rainbow seems very fable-ish/mythological. Here's a little story to tell why rainbows exist. But this is just a small part of the story, and does not seem to justify the entire story.

Another point: If Noah was not Jewish, what is this business about "clean" and "unclean" animals? The laws about clean and unclean animals, as far as anyone knows, didn't come into being until much after Noah's time.

Godot

And the moral of the story:

Don't fuck with God.

Of course, the vast majority of humankind deserved to die a horribly nasty death by deluge. After all, we were created in god's image, according to his plan, and he knew exactly how things would turn out (given the traditional omnimax abilities). It just makes perfect sense!

rlogan

I believe that was Bag full o snakes.