Atheos

How odd that there is ample archaeological evidence that the Egyptian and Chinese languages were spoken and written both before and after the flood.

Well... that gives us a summation according to some people who accept the bible as absolute truth. Unfortunately for the biblical literalist there is much more to be apologized for than accepted. Archaeology, geology, paleontology and biology paint a much different picture and their evidence melds into a history that is in stark contrast to these myths and superstitions.

Apologists tend to assert that the genealogies "skipped generations". That certainly could be the case but there is no evidence for this unwarranted assumption. It is an apology designed to accomodate the fact that this planet (and homo-sapiens-sapiens) is considerably more than 6,000 years old.

I'm going (for a moment) to quit appealing to science and just ask you to use your head. Think about the implications here: Enough water falls from the clouds in 40 days to cover Mt Everest (29,000 feet) plus 15 cubits. The entire globe is smothered in a blanket of water. There is not enough water in the world to do this. Period. It didn't happen.

Few species of fish can survive in both salt water and fresh water. This is a fact pre-technology mankind would not have known. A universal flood would have doomed most species of fish.

There is little about Noah's flood that would have caused problems for people living thousands of years ago. There is nothing acceptable about it in light of modern understanding of the world.

-Atheos

Atheos

I know it the same way you know it. If this ever really happened, even once it would knock everything else off the front page of every newspaper on the planet.
:huh: You talk of justice in light of these two completely unjust examples? The death penalty + instant eternal damnation for (1) using the wrong fire during a worship service and (2) playing the hypocrite. This isn't justice, it's insanity.

I'm sure those midianite women and little boys took great comfort in light of the death of their husbands and fathers, the rape of their daughters and sisters and their own brutal death at the swords of plundering invaders because of god's great sacrifice on the cross. This is total, unmitigated bullshit. I'm sorry.
Just be careful not to light the wrong fire in his presence or he'll blast you. No questions asked.

He lets you ask questions for the simple reason that "he" doesn't exist. You can ask any questions you like, you can behave any way you want to behave, up to and including blaspheming "his" name in every imaginable way and then some. You can dare him to strike you down with lightning. Hell, I dare him right now. C'mon, big guy, gimme your best! If I press "Submit Reply" before you smite me it proves you don't exist and lee_merrill has to eat crow. Don't let him down, you fucking piece of unmitigated horse shit!

You also know very well that people who actually believe god speaks directly to them are invariably considered insane. There is a good reason for this. God isn't speaking to them.

Yeah, that's the hallmark of someone who wants a real relationship -- you do everything I say, exactly as I say it without any backtalk or I'll blast you with fire from heaven clear into eternal damnation.

Sorry, it still doesn't add up. Hell, it doesn't even make even a little bit of sense.

-Atheos

lee_merrill

Hi everyone,

Actually, I believe the flood may have occurred more than 5,000 years ago, there appear to be gaps in the genealogies, so that would be fine if China etc. had lasted for (say) 8,000 years.

Just my point! He got rather dramatically stopped. If he had been cooperative, he could have had his Babylon, and if Alex hadn't fallen sick, or his generals had kept at it, Babylon could well have been rebuilt then, too.

You are claiming to know my thoughts here, are you not?

But you are trying to overthrow belief in the Bible! Why not then take an clear and virtually irrefutable way to do this? You could also rebuild Edom (Isa. 34:9-10, Jer. 49:18), or one other city that I can't recall right now.

That's possible, and I think a better counter than the usual "Oh, no way could what every culture seems to remember have happened." I would, of course, ask for some reason to believe your view!

This, as I seem to recall, is questionable. But grant the point that this was written and meant there! Does it prove that the Ugaritic text came first? And if it does, or if it doesn't, must we conclude that the Israelite point of view was derived from that? No, we need not do so, actually.

You should have read that I prayed, and was healed? I agree this has profound implications if it's true.

Again, you claim virtual omniscience. How did you know what Nadab and Abihu were intending, or what it meant for them to offer their own version of fire on the altar? How did you find out what Ananias and Sapphira had in their hearts, when they did their gift with their pretence?

But the point is that you insist on real and complete justice, now you need to tell me if you would find this satisfactory, in your case? Saying I'm wrong doesn't answer this question.

No, I don't think they realized this, myself, nor do I think that proves that God had a different attitude than the one he demonstrated at the cross. Nor do I think that death was the end of the story, yet (being omniscient) you know whether it was or was not?

You missed the rest of the story, apparently (Lev. 10:16-20).

It's kind of odd that I seem to get insights when I ask. Not to mention healing. Not to mention grace to do well, in areas where I was perpetually failing with all my best efforts...

You know this, of course! Omniscience must be fun, in various ways, though it would also have it's difficult side, I would think, knowing absolutely every thought and every single event.

I have, in fact, not been so perfect. And God is with me, and helps me, day by day, even when I mess up. Direction, it seems, is more important than distance.

Blessings,
Lee

Gawen

Begging your pardon, Lee, but atheists, at least the ones I know don't try to overthrow belief in the bible. Most atheists I know could care less, so long as theists don't try to force their beliefs on everyone else.
As for overthrowing the Bible itself, that's rather easy to do.

This is rather unfair and you know it. It's a mild Ad Hom and serves no good purpose.

Why must these come from God? Why can't insights come from you instead? Why can't you rise from virtual failure to achive something by yourself? I won't bother with the faith healing. I simply do not believe in it.
What? Again? Ummm...4 times in the same post? Come on Lee. Quit grasping for straws and make a half-way decent attempt to reply to Atheos will ya?

It's too bad that you cannot stand on your own two feet, having to rely on an invisible sky daddy instead of your fellow human beings. My direction is my own. Distance is how far I wish to go. And guess what? I'm not perfect either!

Why do we fall down? So we can learn to stand up again.

Not to be pulled up by our bootstraps by an invisible father figure.

Carin Nel

I have never heard about that.



The Flood didn't have to cover the present Earth, but it did have to cover the pre-Flood Earth, and the Bible teaches that the Flood fully restructured the earth. "The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished" (II Peter 3:6). It is gone forever. The earth of today was radically altered by that global event.

That Flood accomplished abundant geologic work. Eroding sediments here, redepositing them there, pushing up continents, elevating plateaus, denuding terrains, etc., so that the earth today is quite different from before. Today even mountain ranges rise high above the sea.

Mt. Everest and the Himalayan range, along with the Alps, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Andes, and most of the world's other mountains are composed of ocean-bottom sediments, full of marine fossils laid down by the Flood. Mt. Everest itself has clam fossils at its summit. These rock layers cover an extensive area, including much of Asia. They give every indication of resulting from cataclysmic water processes. These are the kinds of deposits we would expect to result from the worldwide, world-destroying Flood of Noah's day.

At the end of the Flood, after thick sequences of sediments had accumulated, the Indian subcontinent evidently collided with Asia, crumpling the sediments into mountains. Today they stand as giants—folded and fractured layers of ocean-bottom sediments at high elevations. No, Noah's Flood didn't cover the Himalayas, it formed them!

Thus we find the Biblical account not only possible, but also supported by the evidence. A pre-Flood world with lessened topographic extremes could have been covered by the Great Flood. That Flood caused today's high mountains and deep oceans making such a flood impossible to repeat. This is just as God promised, back in Genesis.

fromdownunder

Therefore, since you are not aware of this, it is not possible. Here is another little bit of information. Archaeology has fairly good evidence indicating the history of Australian Aboriginals going back about 40,000- 50,000 years.

And as far as I have been able to ascertain, there are no flood myths to suggest that this history is broken. Especially in the centre of Australia, where rain, well virtually never happens.

Now please do not use my disclaimers as absence of "proof". I do not use absolutes because it is simply wrong to do so.

Norm

jackrabbit

And this pretty much applies to the god gag itself.

At the time the bible was written, the totality of the universe was the middle east, europe, africa, and maybe asia. No other hemisphere, no australia. The stars were just lights in the sky, maybe a few hundred miles away, if that. The sun was just a bigger, brighter light. It would not take much of a god to make this dipshit little universe. Since man would be a major part of this pissant universe, it would not be unreasonable to think that the creator was interested in him.

But in the real universe, with billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars the equal of our sun? The person who made all that is obsessed about us, when we live on a particle of dirt that would be less than microscopic at the universal scale, by many orders of magnitude?

There could be trillions of intelligent life forms in such a universe, yet goddy-poo appears to be anxious about what we do.

It was always egotistical for the "chosen people" to manufacture the god who "chose" them, but they had no idea how egotistical.

They had an excuse for believing that shit. Modern man doesn't.

jackrabbit

And you think all of this happened in one event, in a short span of time that would have to be less than Noah's lifetime? Have you ever studied geology, or the time scales involved in colliding continents and forming mountain ranges?

Atheos

Well it's out there and there is plenty of it. As you can see there are other isolated groups of homo-sapiens that have survived for tens of thousands of years as well. The "genealogical evidence" in the bible used by Bishop Ussher to calculate the age of the earth includes the ages of each patriarch when each generation began. To argue that these generations have gaps is to argue that the bible is lying about this stuff. The bible is quite clear about the number of years between Adam and Solomon -- this number can be inferred by simply adding the age of each man when the son in question was born. There is only one reason to believe there are gaps in these genealogies: To attempt to defend the biblical account by providing the means to allow for more time, as there is vast evidence showing flourishing civilizations 10,000 years ago, 4,000 years more than the bible accounts for.
This is wishful thinking. That passage does not imply that the surface of the globe was re-formed by the flood, only that the world "perished". It is reasonable to infer that Peter referred to animal life perishing, as the planet ostensibly survived this ordeal.

That flood did not create mountans. Floods do not create mountains, they erode them.

Geology clearly shows that mountain ranges are the result of the movement of tectonic plates on the surface of our planet, slowly compressing together at their join points. It takes millions of years to create an Everest this way. With modern measuring equipment this slow push upwards resulting from tectonic plate movement has been measured, some ranges "growing" at a rate of as much as an inch per year. Volcanic activities also create mountains where once there was ocean. The presence of sedimentary deposits on tops of mountains is consistent with what we know about geology. The idea that 10,000 years ago there was no Mount Everest is preposterous.

Believing the bible is a matter of faith, not science. Sure, anyone who wants to can go to AIG and feed at the tit of Kent Hovind and his ilk as they propagate their junk science that thousands of sheep christians eagerly pay for so they can continue to believe it even though it obviously ain't so. YEC bible literalists are a dying breed, just as those who imprisoned Gallileo as a heretic for arguing that the earth and other planets orbited the sun, rather than the earth being the center of the universe. Many christians already accept bible chronology as "metaphorical", especially the flood, the most easily debunkable myth in the lot.

References:

• Donald Gowan, From Eden To Babel: Genesis 1-11
  Quote:

  From Page 89: “Not only have all archeological excavations failed to uncover any such evidence (for a universal flood), the record of the earth’s history discovered by geology virtually rules out the possibility that anything of that sort has ever happened.”

• Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture
  Quote:

  “There is no known geological data to support those who defend a universal flood.”

-Atheos

Stephen T-B

Going back to page 1, this caught my eye:
"...heaven where God's will is always done (mdarus )."

Sounds ominous to me.
What do we know about this god's will?

As he made it clear to the great prophet Samuel in the reign of Saul, it was that the Israelites should not only slay the entire Amalakite army, but all the Amalakite babies, children, women and old folk, and all their animals. When Saul baulked at carrying this out to the letter and spared their king, Agag, Saul had Agag brought before him, and we read that he "hewed him to pieces in the sight of the Lord".

Nice one God!

God's will was to drown the Earth, and all but breeding pairs of every terrestrial creature, including quite useful things like bees and earth worms and quite harmless things like the sloth, the koala bear and the duck-billed platipus. This god seems to have thought that the ones which were preserved on the Ark would produce generations of off-spring which would behave better than their ancestors. How differently could the new generations of lions have behaved? How were ants and termites and parasitic wasps improved?

I'd not care to be stuck for an eternity anywhere that was subject to this crazy god's will.


Then we had this from Carin Nel: "Don't tell me that when you clearly say to your child, 'don't touch that flame, it will burn you', and she even repeat it to her friend, touches the flame, gets burned, that you can blame yourself and say that you set her up!"

This isn't quite what happened to Adam and Eve in the G of E is it?

These two were newly created - as innocent as new-born babes (but in adult bodies).
Every sensible parent knows that its child has to be taught what "No!" means. One does it by giving the command, and when it is ignored, by imposing an appropriately moderated sanction or expressing disapproval in an unmistakable way. "No!" thus becomes a meaningful expression, and the child is steered away from making big mistakes, like putting its hand in a flame.

The "all-wise" God of the Jews didn't know this. In Adam and Eve it had two children on its hands. They were clueless. So this "loving", "all-wise" God, having put the Serpent in the G of E, knowing full well it would try tricking them, and a tree bearing a "forbidden fruit" which it knew they would eat, then proceeded to lay on them a condign and everlasting punishment for committing the "crime" of disobeying it.
In legal terms, this is known as "entrapment," and it is not looked on favorably by our courts in the UK which have before them an ideal of Justice that thankfully is not inspired by the god of the OT.


I especially love this: "The 3 sons of Noah that went forth from the Ark after the flood were SHEM, HAM and JAPHET. God blessed them and said to them to be plentiful and to replenish the earth. "
Yup.
And how did they do that?
Where were the women who would bear their children?
Oh right! After the Flood there was just one woman.
Their mother!
One can imagine the home life of the Noah family:
"Your turn Shem."
"No No Ham. It's Japhet's. She's not had one of his babies for at least nine months."

What I find so entertaining is the way Christians, whose god was created by a messianic bunch of radical preachers around 2,000 years ago (one of whom might have been a guy called Jesus), are obliged to defend a god created by a backward Bronze-age tribe of Semites.
Their god has, of course, been changing ever since that first big modernisation, and even the Roman Catholics' is comparatively up-to-date. It no longer, for instance, approves of slavery or burning heretics (and Jews) alive.
But somehow, the modern "loving" god must be reconciled with a primitive one, notable for being violent, vindictive, capricious and cruel.

And thus, no doubt, the incoherence.