The Flood

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The Flood of the Old Testament has baffled me for a long time. I have recently began to study it and talk to some christian friends. The more i look at it the more incredibly insane it seams. But they seam pretty headstrong that this is the truth. The same arguments roll around everytime in the christian community but i have come up with some less heard of ones.

How could the freshwater fish survive in salty water?
Why is the beginning of Genesis 6 saying the angels may have caused this so under realized?
Where did all that water go?
Why is such a mythological concept still around?
What does sedimentary rock prove about anything?
What about the claims of the Ark being found?

These are just some start up questions. Im just really trying to figure this whole thing out.

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The flood, as told in the Bible, absolutely did not happen. I do think the flood myth in the Bible and other flood myths from that area were inspired by a real event though. You may find the Black Sea deluge theory interesting.

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A flood? Probably, as Megaman already pointed out, a local flood is a likely probability. Unlike the 'new testament' which is a fabrication, the OT does contain enough externally verifiable history to give the idea some merit.

The flood? That there are people out there that still believe this makes it hard to be optimistic about the human race in general.

EpiNirvana wrote:

Why is such a mythological concept still around?

That is the core of the issue right there. My answer is because we are still mostly primitive monkeys.

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The boxing day tsunami wiped out entire villages in parts of Indonesia, while people a small way out to sea in boats survived. A flood that covered the entire known world would almost certainly have occurred at least once in the last 6000 years. Fables inevitably stem from such events.

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Im kinda in agrement with Eorl. There probably was some incredibly massive flood that was observed and with everything exagerated. The human nature is an intresting one. With Greek Myhology lightning was Zues' might staff and fire a ill tempered gift from Promethius. The Flood story seams like that. A god punishing his ppl with an increible world wide flood. i cant figure out what point weather was no longer wrath of dieties but just weather. It seams we get off these crazy claims the more intellegent we are but for some reason the oldest ones still hang on.

I like the Black Sea deluge Theory. I have never heard that before but it seams well founded.

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Epi, there are still plenty of people attributing weather to supernatural causes. I bet I could dig up a thousand such comments on Hurricane Katrina without even trying.

Scientific investigation of the world and the universe has been going on long before it was called "science" and has always been opposed by the superstitious every step of the way, only grudgingly accepted over time in the face of overwhelming evidence....requiring a re-definition of the superstition itself.

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Re: The Flood

EpiNirvana wrote:

The Flood of the Old Testament has baffled me for a long time. I have recently began to study it and talk to some christian friends. The more i look at it the more incredibly insane it seams. But they seam pretty headstrong that this is the truth. The same arguments roll around everytime in the christian community but i have come up with some less heard of ones.

How could the freshwater fish survive in salty water?
Why is the beginning of Genesis 6 saying the angels may have caused this so under realized?
Where did all that water go?
Why is such a mythological concept still around?
What does sedimentary rock prove about anything?
What about the claims of the Ark being found?

These are just some start up questions. Im just really trying to figure this whole thing out.

Since the world is 75-80% covered in water NOW, it is not hard to imagine that a world with far fewer and smaller 'mountains' and the landmass all in one place could have been completely covered in water.

As for sedimentary rock, it is pretty good 'proof' that the area was once under water.

So when , for instance, you find sedimentary rock AND coral atop Mt Everest......

.......... plus you find sedimentary layers around the world that are not just a few few thick in many locations, but actually MILES thick in some areas then it can be the basis for a lot of serious questions about our assumptions about what 'cannot' have happened.

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bm!

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Re: The Flood

EpiNirvana wrote:

The Flood of the Old Testament has baffled me for a long time. I have recently began to study it and talk to some christian friends. The more i look at it the more incredibly insane it seams. But they seam pretty headstrong that this is the truth. The same arguments roll around everytime in the christian community but i have come up with some less heard of ones.

How could the freshwater fish survive in salty water?
Why is the beginning of Genesis 6 saying the angels may have caused this so under realized?
Where did all that water go?
Why is such a mythological concept still around?
What does sedimentary rock prove about anything?
What about the claims of the Ark being found?

These are just some start up questions. Im just really trying to figure this whole thing out.

The story of the Flood is true, except not in the sense that Christians have come to believe it in. People tend to forget that liquid water is not the only thing in the universe that floods. LOL

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It was a local occurance, if it happened at all.

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Chai Tea wrote:

It was a local occurance, if it happened at all.

It was local and worldwide. Water is not the only liquid that floods.

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Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, wrote:

"Two mythologies are found in the story of the Flood. One is that of the planting culture, the old-city mythology of cyclic karma - of the ages of gold, silver, bronze, iron, during which the world's moral condition deteriorated. The Flood then came and wiped it out to bring about a fresh start. India abounds in stories of this kind, for the flood is a basic story associated with this cyclic experience through what we might term a year of years.
The second mythology is that of a God who created people, some of whom misbehave. He then said, 'I regret that I have created these people. Look at what I've done! I am going to wipe them all out.' That is another God, and certainly not the same God as in the first mythology. I emphasize this observation because two totally different ideas of God are involved in the word 'God.' The latter God is one who creates. One thinks of that God as a fact. That we say, is the Creator. We conceptualize that God as IT. On the other hand, in the impersonal dynamism of the cycles of time the gods are simply the agents of the cycle."

(taken from this site)

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Eorl wrote:

Epi, there are still plenty of people attributing weather to supernatural causes. I bet I could dig up a thousand such comments on Hurricane Katrina without even trying.

Scientific investigation of the world and the universe has been going on long before it was called "science" and has always been opposed by the superstitious every step of the way, only grudgingly accepted over time in the face of overwhelming evidence....requiring a re-definition of the superstition itself.

Well obviously thier still are a ton of people thinking god targeted them or if they were spared it was for some great plan.

The sedimentary rock proves nothing of a flood to me. It only shows that the world is all made from the same stuff. Probably at one time the rocks of mount everest was a ocean rock, but this proves nothing of a world wide flood.

I also have trouble with the sinful man so god destoyed the whole world. I find the beginning of Genisis 6 incredibly intresting for it says that angles roamed the earth and the Sons of God married to women, so gods spirit was among them. Thats why the lived so long. This seams to make more of a reason for god to flood the earth than ppl being disobediant.

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Mindonfire wrote:

Chai Tea wrote:
It was a local occurance, if it happened at all.

It was local and worldwide. Water is not the only liquid that floods.

yeah, I heard you the first time, but that doesn't mean I know WTF you're talking about.

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Re: The Flood

real life wrote:

So when , for instance, you find sedimentary rock AND coral atop Mt Everest......

And here's how it got there:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3047313.stm

Everest rock map published
By Carolyn Fry

More than 1,000 people climbed Mount Everest during the past 50 years but none thought to record the rock types beneath their feet. Now, after six years exploring the region, an earth scientist from Oxford University has created the first ever geological map of the mountain.

The 1:100,000-scale map, which covers around 1,500 square kilometres and straddles the Nepal-Tibet border, shows that rocks at the very top of the world's highest peak were laid down in a shallow tropical sea some 400 million years ago.
"I have some samples here in my office where you can still see tiny fragments of coral and conodonts which were once swimming around in an ocean somewhere near the equator," explains Dr Mike Searle, Research Fellow at Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences.
These marine sediments lie atop sedimentary and igneous rocks which have been baked by high temperatures and pressures into crystalline metamorphic rocks.
Many rocks around the base of Everest are unique granites containing unusual minerals such as tourmaline, garnet and mica.
Conveyor belt system
The strange juxtaposition is caused by the ongoing collision between two vast slabs of continental crust.
The Indian plate is moving northwards and piling into the Asian plate, in the process pushing rocks deep down into the crust. This subduction is in turn forcing the rocks above upwards - including those around Everest.
Two shallow faults slice through the mountain and over millions of years, subducted rocks have been transported above the higher fault and jacked up to form the higher Himalayan peaks.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39076000/gif/_39076834_everest_composition_inf416.gif

"It's really a giant conveyor belt system," explains Dr Searle.
"Rocks are progressively subducted to the north, transferred above the fault and then progressively extruded to the south. The top of Everest is literally the uppermost layer of this extruding channel."
Dr Searle visited Everest five times from the Nepalese side and once from Tibet to gather information for the map.
As well as identifying rocks in the field, he gathered 400 samples for chemical analysis and examined aerial photographs and satellite images to map inaccessible areas.

----------
P

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No problem with that Pauligirl, except we would disagree on the timeline.

It simply shows that even the world's tallest peak, Everest, could have been, in fact WAS undersea at some point.

There are virtually NO areas of the world that do not have some evidence of having been undersea at some point.

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You know Christians will not buy that explanation. Rocks being pushed up. Are you crazy? That is not plausible. Rocks shifting. The earth moving. What kind of fable is that. Those rocks were carried up there by a flood of water. Now that is a more reasonable explanation. LOL

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real life wrote:

No problem with that Pauligirl, except we would disagree on the timeline.

It simply shows that even the world's tallest peak, Everest, could have been, in fact WAS undersea at some point.

There are virtually NO areas of the world that do not have some evidence of having been undersea at some point.

At some point, yes. Just not all at the same time.
P

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Mindonfire wrote:

You know Christians will not buy that explanation. Rocks being pushed up. Are you crazy? That is not plausible. Rocks shifting. The earth moving. What kind of fable is that. Those rocks were carried up there by a flood of water. Now that is a more reasonable explanation. LOL

LOL thats hysterical! i think its all mythology. some evidence we find could be from a local flood age where many floods where happening in the same time period.

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Mountains
Theists have flooding the mountains covered, as the mountains did not exist until after the flood as stated in the Psalms: At God's decree the 'mountains rose and the valleys sank'.

All the water
Curent scientific theory claims an Ice Age that reached as far south as Missouri. These ice sheets would be much thicker closer to the poles. Where did all of this water come from?

Also of note is the current scientific belief that Mars has experienced flooding of epic proportions. Where did all of this water come from?

To believe in a worldwide flood and/or God requires faith.

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The Flood

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