gstafleu

Since we seem to be focusing on the flood myth here, let me try to help Tony out a bit--but only a bit!

If you do a google for "flood myth" you will find a bunch of them, for example this page. The first thing you will notice that there is something universal about the myths: they occur quite universally (this is supposed to help Tony ), and they (almost) all have the same theme. The theme is that the flood is a way to reboot creation, because something has gone wrong (the exception being the Chinese myth). Why is a flood used to wipe the slate clean? Well, of course a flood works pretty well that way, but that is not the only reason.

Have a look at Genesis 1:2 "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." Note the waters. It is a frequently occurring theme in creation myths that "in the beginning" there was only, or mainly, a great big deep watery expanse, which is then transformed into the earth etc. The flood used to wipe the slate clean is an instance, a re-occurrence, of this Ur-water. So after things have gone wrong, we have a re-creation, using a re-occurrence of the Ur-water. Some of you may have been wondering "Where did they get all that water to flood the whole earth?" That's where. The fact that real floods are also pretty good at washing things away helps the impact of the imagery.

So the good news for Tony is the universalism bit. The bad news is that the water that the myths talk about isn't even real water! One out of two ain't bad?

Gerard Stafleu

Julian

[MOD]
Any sustained discussions regarding tectonics, evolution, geology and other, similar topics related to history leading up to the current state of this planet, should be discussed in the EvC forum. Please restrict this discussion to scipture as much as possible.

Julian
Moderator, BC&H
[/MOD]

EarlOfLade

Well, Julian...

It goes to the historicity of the OT, so It should be OK in this thread, no?

Mageth

The Peleg/"earth divided" reference (Gen 10:25-32) is much more likely to refer to the dispersal or division of people or nations (see the Babel account in the next chapter, Genesis 11) than to continental breakup and drift. Peleg was alive at the time of the dispersal of the "nations", and thus his name (which means "division").

Look at the rest of Ch. 10. There are other references to division. A theme of Ch. 10-11 appears to be how the earth was divided among the generations of Noah:

10:32 These [are] the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

10:25 may be better read in context as "for in his days was the earth divided among the nations".

We get the "you gotta read it in context" argument about the Bible a lot around here. This is one place where I think that would be quite appropriate.

Amaleq13

All the continents on earth were one continent 250 million years ago.

Is that when you believe the Great Flood described in the Bible took place?

Gamera

Without a standard of historical accuracy, what does it mean to say that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are historically inaccurate?

Most modern historians wouldn't even use this terminology, at least not since Hayden White's groundbreaking work on histories as narratives.

Mech Bliss

This is nonsense because the existence of Pangea, the last amalgamation of earth's continents was hundreds of millions of years ago, well before humans arrived on the scene, and this has been corroborated by numerous lines of geologic evidence of which you are so obviously ignoring.

We know that it has been that slow for millions of years, and before modern humans existed. As per the moderator note, the rebuttal of any catastrophic plate tectonic event occurring in human history has been posted in E/C:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=196822

It simply didn't happen, and to say that it did not only ignores evidence, it is totally unsupported by any evidence itself.

spin

Most tellingly, Egypt didn't have one.


spin

spamandham

Your friend seems to be under the misguided assumption that historical accuracy = "god exists". That obvioulsy doesn't follow. He sent you on a fool's errand.

ManIsGod

HaHa
That means you have no evidence your god exists.

M