conkermaniac

Very good point indeed. If events such as the flood were subject to archaic interpretation, then can't the rest of the Bible be as thus too?

Actually, what they're claiming is that Earth = Middle East to the authors of the Bible. Therefore, whenever they refer to Earth in the Bible, it apparently is supposed to refer to the Middle East because the people back then didn't know any better, and thus they wouldn't have understood if God had told them that it was so. You'll often see Magus using this argument, in fact. I think he or someone else on this forum once said something along the lines of, "How is God supposed to explain genetics to a people that don't know about cells and atoms?"

Insomniac Dreams

I suppose a regional flood would do if your Near Eastern civilisation believed that they were the whole world, that nothing other than them existed. However, it is hard to believe this when the Near East had extensive trade links not only with Egypt, but also the Indus Valley.

The telling of a global deluge could be quite useful in conning the uneducated masses of the civilisations into doing your bidding.

Kosh

A Universal flood is actually quite likely. they've got a lot of big pipes on those water rides at the "Studio", and sooner or later, one of them is going to break....

Good thing they're on a steep hill.

nermal

Point is, no matter how massive a flood, if it is regional people far away aren't necessarily looking at a giant block of water.
Walls of water 100 feet, or even meters high, are not inconcievable in a flood of the black sea. If the slip of land between the Black and Aegean sea broke, great high walls of water would pour through for weeks or months. No one in China would see a thing, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that a people sufficiently far away and high might have witnessed the whole event.
Such a thing would be passed down orally as legend, to become myth, to become Noah's flood.

Ed

Amos

Yes, it does say that and now I wonder why it would say that.

Evolutionist

i've got a quick question. i know the answer to it, but am annoyingly drawing an utter blank at the moment.

i know this is incorrect, but i can't actually remember any of the relevent passages which say so. this may be a little off topic, but i don't see the point in starting a new post over a very quick question.

Gamer4Fire

You mean when he stormed the temple and kicked the "holy shit" out of the money lenders?

-DM-

. . . or when he called the Pharisees "vipers" and "hypocrites," or when he called them "fools" not too long after having admonished others to never call a man "fool" [MT 5:22 & 23:17], or when "he looked around at them angrily" [MK 3:5] having denounced "anger" [MT 5:22], or when he consigns to hell those who don't believe in him?

-Don-

Wiploc

If you don't like the giant-cube-of-water theory, Maybe the water was only three feet deep, and the mountains retracted so they were one foot high. If you allow that miracles could happen, any theory is as good as any other.

Quote:

I also added that if the flood was regional, that would only render the Bible false,

The bible is shot thru with contradictions. If it is somehow "true" in spite of them, then one more won't make it false.

Quote:

as it clearly states that every mountain "under the heavens" was covered by water.

While god was retracting the mountains, he was also moving the heavens.

You can't use logic on their miracles, but you should be quick to throw miracles at their logic.

Quote:

Then they went on about how the Bible isn't wrong and how the "world" described in Genesis was only the interpretation of the people of the time. I said that God would not allow such a blatant error to enter into his "Holy Book", if He wanted the word to be spread to other countries and to be for all time. Then they went on about how the Bible is divinely inspired, not divinely monitored, or some crap like that.

Sometimes they think the bible is right, the source of truth; other times they have to make excuses for it and do recuperative interpretation. How do they choose which parts to take straight and which parts to reinterpret? Here you get to point out that they are two-stepping. Call them on it every time they switch gears from getting truth out of the bible to injecting their view of truth into it.

And ask them why they bother to denature the flood myth. Are they saying it wasn't really a miracle? If it was a miracle, why couldn't it be a big miracle, flooding the whole world?

Quote:

How should I settle the matter once and for all? Is there any impeccable argument that I can use so that at least I can back them into the corner and make them say, "Goddidit"?

If they don't want to say the flood was a miracle, ask them if they believe there are any other miracles in the bible. If so, ask why they believe in them but not in this one.

crc

Haleysred

These people who are in your class, what is their theological background?