Creation "Science" And The Flood of Noah.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Originally posted by MORON


This is not fun without Civnation types around......

doh who made him go

the site lost a couple of rating points in the fun department

[Saint Marcus]

Only in America...

...can events described in the bible be interpreted as science




It's sad how some people are stuck in the dark ages.

[Robert]

edit: wrong thread

[faded glory]

There will always be those who say it cannot of happened!

Yet every culture, every peoples has a story of a great flood and a man in a boat!

Yet the most rational conclusion would be, that a flood did happen; and it destroyed and entire civilization. But there are always those who are irrational...(mark L, Connerkimbro)

[MasterBob The Elder]

I'm a evolutionist myself, but I'll take up the other side for now.


You say the techilogical aspects were not possible in the second millenium B.C. ?

Actually we don't know how much acient civilization progressed. Remember that acient cultures in the Americas built structures that perfectly coordinated with the position of the sun and stars, such a feat in not duplicatable even with today's technology.

And for the argument that there is no evidence, there doesn't need to be, if god does really exist, he could erase all evidence if he wanted to, I mean, he is god after all.

[faded glory]

Im not of course saying it was "Noah's Flood". But is it that far fetched to think that 8,000 years ago there once was a people who flooded? And one of them knew (probably upper class) about the impending doom...and decided to save himself and family, along with his herds?

There was a flood.....


There are too many parralel's in the flood storys to debunk it as a simple myth made up by old geysers....

[Sprayber]

Originally posted by Mark L
Only in America...

...can events described in the bible be interpreted as science




It's sad how some people are stuck in the dark ages.

Sometimes, your just funny. Other times I am concerned that you actually think this way. Are generalizations all your good at?

[Shi Huangdi]

"Only in America..."

So there are no creationists in Europe, the Mid-east, etc.? Why, we even have one of your countrymen on this thread believes the flood really happened.

Just another one of your sorry, pathetic attempts to make yourself feel better by bashing other countries

[Sikander]

This is all from recollection, so don't quote me on this but..

The Classical World flood myths are thought to have originated from the merging of the Mediterranean sea with the Black sea. Before this the Black Sea was a somewhat smaller freshwater lake, but the melting of the glaciers made the sea levels rise, and eventually the rising waters of the Med cut a channel (now called the Bosporus) to the Black sea. Because the Black sea was significantly lower than sea level, it grew very quickly and flooded a significant area formerly habitated along it's shores. Many were killed, and many more were dislocated.

Here is a creationist site for those interested in the search for Noah's Ark. (And I have a piece of the true cross for any of you who can come up with a reasonable bid).

http://www.noahsarksearch.com/

Here is a bit about the older myths:

Biblical Flood

originally put on the web by James Still

The biblical flood story, the "deluge," was a late offshoot of a cycle of flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by Sumerian Ziusudra. In Akkad, the flood hero's name was Atrakhasis. In Babylon he was Uta-Napishtim, the only mortal to become immortal. In Greece he was Deucalion, who repopulated the earth after the waters subsided, with the help of his wife Pyrrha and the advice of the Great Goddess of the waters, Themis. In Armenia, the hero was Xisuthros--a corruption of Sumerian Ziusudra--whose ark landed on Mount Ararat.

According to the original Chaldean account, the flood hero was told by his god, "Build a vessel and finish it. By a deluge I will destroy substance and life. Cause thou to go up into the vessel the substance of all that has life." Technical instructions followed: the ark was to be 600 cubits long by 60 wide, with three times 3600 measures of asphalt on its exterior and the same amount inside. Three times 3600 porters brought chests of provisions, of which 3600 chests were for the hero's immediate family, while "the mariners divided among themselves twice three thousand six hundred chests." It seems that Noah's ark was much smaller than earlier heroic proportions.

As long ago as 1872, George Smith translated the Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal's library, and discovered the earlier version of the flood myth. Among the details that religious orthodoxy took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn't want her earthly children drowned. Mother Isthar severely punished the disobedient god by cursing him with her "great lightnings." She set her magic rainbow in the heavens to block his access to offerings on earthly altars, "since rashly he caused the flood-storm, and handed over my people to destruction."

Old Testament writers copied other details of the ancient flood myth but could not allow their god to be punished by the Great Whore of Babylon, as if he were a naughty child sent to bed without supper by an angry mother. Thus, they transformed Ishtar's rainbow barrier into a "sign of the covenant" voluntarily set in the heavens by God himself (Genesis 9:13).

The Tigris-Euphrates valley was subject to disastrous floods. One especially was long remembered; geologists have linked it with the volcanic cataclysm that blew apart the island of Thera (Santorin) and destroyed Cretan civilization. When Sir Leonard Woolley was excavating the site of Ur, he found the track of a might flood--a layer of clay without artifacts, eight feet thick. Such a flood may have been identified with the watery Chaos that all Indo-European peoples believed would swallow up the world at the end of its cycle, and out of which a new world would be reborn in the womb of the Formless Mother. The ark and its freight represented seeds of life passing through the period of Chaos from the destruction of one universe to the birth of the next. Even in the Bible, the "birth" was heralded by the Goddesss' yonic dove (Genesis 8:12).

Gnostic literature preserved the older view of the flood-causing God as an evil destroyer of humanity, and the Goddess as its preserver. Because people refused to worship him alone, jealous Jehovah sent the flood to wipe out all life. Fortunately the Goddess opposed him, "and Noah and his family were saved in the ark by means of the sprinkling of light that proceeded from her, and through it the world was again filled with humankind."

This Gnostic interpretation had both Babylonian and Hellenic roots. Greeks said the primal sea-mother Themis gave Deucalion and his wife occult knowledge ("light") of how to create human beings from stones, "the bones of their Mother," i.e., of the earth. Raising up living people from stones or bones was a popular miracle. Jesus mentioned it, and Ezekiel's God claimed to have done it in the valley of bones (Ezekiel 37).

from: http://www.2think.org/hii/flood.shtml


And another classical take:

The first book about Noah's flood that makes sense

Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Myth is a book that takes a fresh look at six versions of the Ancient Near East flood myth, demythologizes them, and combines the various story elements like pieces of a jigsaw picture puzzle into one coherent story. There actually was an archaeologically confirmed flood about 2900 BC on which the ark stories were based, but it was a local river flood, not a global deluge. The original ark stories were about a small commercial river barge that was hauling a few hundred cattle, sheep, and goats, but there were no kangaroos, lions, apes, elephants, or giraffes on that cattle barge.

The emphasis in this book is on what was physically possible, technologically practical, and consistent wth archaeological facts in ancient Sumer, now southern Iraq. The result of this synthesis is a reconstruction of a lost legend about a Sumerian king named Ziusudra who was chief executive of the city-state Shuruppak at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period about 2900 BC. A six-day thunderstorm caused the Euphrates River to rise 15 cubits, overflow the levees, and flood Shuruppak and a few other cities in Sumer. A few feet of yellow sediment deposited by this river flood is archaeologically attested and artifacts at about this sediment level have been radiocarbon dated.

When the levees overflowed, Ziusudra (Noah) boarded a commercial river barge that had been hauling grain, beer, and other cargo on the Euphrates River. The barge floated down the river into the Persian (Arabian) Gulf where it grounded in an estuary at the mouth of the river. Ziusudra (Noah) then offered a sacrifice on an altar at the top of a nearby hill which storytellers mistranslated as mountain. This led them to falsely assume that the nearby barge had grounded on top of a mountain. Actually it never came close to a mountain.

Skeptics are correct when they say Noah's flood (as it is commonly understood) could not have happened, because many of the story elements, such as grounding of the ark in the mountains of Ararat, would have been physically impossible. This book uncovers how the mountains of Ararat got involved in the story (Noah did not go there) and locates the precise spot (within a few meters) of where Noah offered his sacrifice. This is a historical site (not on a mountain) that has already been excavated by archaeologists.

After the ark grounded, Noah met other survivors of the flood and some of the things they discussed are mentioned in the myth that priests and storytellers told about the flood. Noah's family separated and Noah had to flee into exile, because of conflicts between Noah and other survivors of the flood. The place where Noah lived until his death is identified in this book. Noah's sons traveled northwest on foot along the Tigris River and settled at a place identified in this book.

The incredible numbers in Genesis 5 were the result of an ancient scribe mistranslating some archaic pre-cuneiform numbers into cuneiform sexagesimal numbers. The incredible numbers in the Sumerian King List were also mistranslated by another ancient scribe. This book successfully matches the Genesis 5 numbers to the Sumerian King List numbers.

From: http://www.flood-myth.com/

For some good chuckles:

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c013.html

[phoenixcager]

Just wondering....

Apparantly the Chinese character for 'boat' looks like a combination of the characters for 'vessel', 'eight' and 'mouth', which could mean "eight people in a boat".....a coded message about the flood?

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Mark L
It's sad how some people are stuck in the dark ages.

It's also sad how some people have their head stuck up their ass.

Give me one reason why everything in the bible should be considered fiction? It was written a very long time ago, and many of the stories with in it have a factual basis.


Sure, the stories are not as accurate as a scientific report would be and they where not written to be a percise record of events, but just about every story from the past has atleast some bit of truth in it which reflects the history, culture, or politics of the time.

[connorkimbro]

Apparantly the Chinese character for 'boat' looks like a combination of the characters for 'vessel', 'eight' and 'mouth', which could mean "eight people in a boat".....a coded message about the flood?

I've heard this before. You live in china, and speak chinese, don't you? Couldn't you find out for us?

[connorkimbro]

Give me one reason why everything in the bible should be considered fiction?

Oh, there are no reasons at all for that. in fact, probably there is lots of things in the bible that ARE true.

It's the things that aren't true that i'm concerned about. Adam and even, noah's flood, crucifixtion, etc.

[faded glory]

crucifixtion

I suppose your going to offer something to back that up?

[connorkimbro]

Ok, crucifixition may have happened. Heck, the romans crucified people all the time.

I should have said "ressurection" not crucifixtion.