In the Bibles defense, it didn’t just rain:
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. Genesis 7:11
So, like, most of the water probably came from underground, not from the rain. Though I’d imagine both were pretty bad.
Not saying the story is true or anything. Just pointing out the straw man, since the Bible doesn’t claim all the water was from rain.
If the Black Sea theory is correct, it wasn’t even a global flood, but it would have seemed like the end of the world for anyone caught in it.
There’s not much difference between a global flood and a flood of West Eurasia to the people living in West Eurasia, where the Bible was written.
Welp, this is sending me off on an hour+ wikipedia kick. Thanks!
My work here is done! ;)
There’s a number of places where Old Testament stories may actually be describing the stories of Bronze Age Libyans who end up relocated into the Southern Levant along with the sea peoples. Joseph with a colorful coat and an interpreter of dreams is sometimes likened to the Hyskos but compare the coat vs the depiction of the Libu. Not only are the Libu sporting blue in their coats, like the tekhelet later found in the OT, there’s even the Tuareg Libyan people known for their blue dye and matriarchal lineage.
Around the time that tomb image is recorded there’s even a papyrus talking about how the followers of Set have red hair and interpret dreams, and this is also the period when the Egyptian story “A Tale of Two Brothers” emerges with a number of similarities to the Joseph story.
This is interesting in light of the flood mythos because we now know that at the end of the ice age there was a migration down from Europe across the ice bridge to North Africa. This was around the time there really was coastal flooding including relatively rapid events which may have even persisted in local oral traditions.
Part of the issue with analysis of Biblical stories in terms of historicity (outside of the supernatural stuff) may be that we’re analyzing a collection of stories that had been syncretized into a local tradition and later appropriated, much like the story of ‘Israel’ (Jacob) taking the birthright and blessing of Esau (the eponymous founder of Edom, meaning ‘red’) in the Bible.
In fact, according to the Dead Sea scroll fragment 4Q534 Noah had red hair.
So it need not even necessarily be that there was flooding in the Southern Levant for the flood mythos to be based on an oral tradition.
All that said, personally I’m rather persuaded by Idan Dershowitz’s analysis that the Noah story was originally a story of drought and famine before syncretizing the Babylonian flood mythos into it later on and transforming it into a flood epic.
Thanks for the link, very interesting read!
Wasn’t it likely the end of the ice age?
Isn’t that about 10,000 years before that?
The Red Sea flood makes way more sense (ha). Especially when you consider what peoples’ sense of “the whole world” was at the time.
Though some thinkers did already know the circumference of the earth, which make Judaism and Christianity sound even more ass backwards when you consider it all.
The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, so 8,000 BC, which kind of makes sense considering the Biblical timeline.
How is the earth’s circumference relevant to Christianity?
He’s implying the writer of Genesis should have known that the flood only covered their area instead of writing the whole world. Because someone in Greece already calculated the circumference of the earth at the time.
Either way the great flood is not just documented in the Torah which is interesting, and if findings are reported as true, it’s not the first documentation of the flood.
Regardless, what was written and how the actual events transpired doesn’t break the writings or purpose of them in Christianity/Judaism
The thing is, even if accounts of the flood was written before the Torah was written, it just further shows that it did happen. The earth’s circumference was measured in 240bc by the greeks. Which is long after the flood no matter who you ask.
Oh I wouldn’t know about the earth’s circumference being measured. The comment about calling Christianity backwards because of some “enlightened” idea that there were mathematicians during the time of (in their eyes) “magic” being reported is insensible. Atheists will atheist.
In the Bible’s offense, it probably wasn’t even originally a flood story.
This relates to the bible concept of firmament, flat earth and separation of waters, as in genesis when it says god separated waters above and below.
The nomads knew wells, rain, islands, tides and flooding rivers, so the world they conceptualised was one where God moved water above and below to reveal dry land. As such in the story it seemed logically consistent to allow massive amounts of water to come from above and below returning the world in what they considered a previous, erased state to reboot it.
Yes, it’s not only rain even as per Quran
“At length, behold! there came our Command, and the fountains of the earth gushed forth.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:40
and
“O Earth! swallow up your water, and O Sky! withhold your rain! and the water abated and the matter was ended. The Ark rested on Mount Judi.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:44
Oh, i guess it all makes sense now…
It’s actually plausible. There is now evidence to suggest that the earth having 3x more water inside it than on it.
No it isn’t. Geology does not back up a global flood.
When it rains a lot and the ground gets saturated it can seem like the water is coming up from the ground. Also you know they had wells so they knew water is in ground.
Reading comprehension is hard today, I know.
Well aside from trapped water existing or not, this certainly didn’t happen. The geological layering of soil would tell us, the extinction events would tell us, and the fossils would tell us.
Not to mention there’s also a massive problem with heat and moving that much water so quickly.
Triple the amount of surface water is far from enough to suggest a global flood is remotely possible, let alone plausible.
It isn’t though. A worldwide flood would leave behind plenty of evidence in the geologic record. That it doesn’t exist makes it quite implausible. Making matters worse is the supposed time of the flood had many civilizations with extensive records for hundreds of years before and after forget to mention they were wiped out and instead just continued living through the flood without noticing it.
We also don’t talk about the fact that the only humans that were saved was a family. Who repopulated the earth.
Like, with Adam and Eve and their offspring, the implication is that they inbred because literally no other humans existed. Still pretty gross, but the second time it happened was just abject laziness on God’s part. Like your omnipotent ass couldn’t have at the very least picked a few more families.
I think I figured the math on the assumption that Noah’s kids brought significant others with and it was technically possible to avoid parent-child pairings so long as each unrelated male female combination was utilized, which is to say they screwed each others wives in addition to their own. Not like the bible gives a fuck about parent child incest babies, that was Lot’s whole character arc.
The animals, on the other hand, those are all shit out of luck.
Slight disagreement. With Adam and Eve it is implied that there were other people about. Which is why Cain complains that if he is cast out someone will murder him. And why it isn’t clear who the males are mating with.
The current understanding is that this was the origin story for those people and they thought pretty much every tribe around them had their own god with their own origin story. Later on retrocons left plot problems.
Yeah and the kangaroos had to be yeeted back to Australia and were not allowed to stop anywhere on the way
Right? Like people in the local area may have been terrible, but there were other people.
He just delegated that to Noah. But Noah doesn’t quite have the same air of authority as fucking God, so of course nobody believed him until it started flooding. Even if it wasn’t God who told him about it, like maybe he was just really good at predicting the weather or something, I could see the same thing happening.
The ark story doesn’t necessarily mean that all of sea level rise was result of rainfall.
Domino collapse of glaciers have been known to raise sea levels extremely quickly.
There was even a theory by a palentologist (which I cant currently find) of an ice dam left over from an ice age which separated two major parts of the ocean, which had different sea levels. When the ice dam eventually collapsed, the oceans would have reached equilibrium in a matter of days. Given the chaotic history of plate tectonics and ice ages, this isnt an unreasonable theory. Imagine if the mouth of the Mediterranean was frozen over, and the body evaporated down to lower levels, and people settled there. Then the ice wall collapsed.
Im not saying any of this explains a ridiculous bible story, just that, as a scientist, its short-sighted to assume rainfall was the only possible contributor to the flood.
I don’t understand why a wooden ark would melt like sugar under any circumstances.
It wouldn’t. It would just break apart like if was hit with a huge mallet.
One morereason to like the fact France dont have any lesson on religion in its schools. (But let’s be honest, there is also a aweful lot to dislike in our schools.)
It’s illegal to teach religion in US schools unless it’s specifically a class about religion. Which typically happens only in college
Maybe it’s because I’m in the deep south, but my high school had old testament & new testament classes when I attended.
That’s technically allowed as long as they are either extra curricular or electives
There are so many inconsistencies with this stuff, but what bothers me most is something else. The whole thing is just needlessly cruel to all living beings, many of which did nothing wrong. An omnipotent god could have done something way less cruel and way more efficient if it wanted to.
The Old Testament doesn’t do a lot to give the idea that god is “benevolent” or “kind”
Cruelty was kinda the schtick
Anyone interested in this, I suggest listening to the “Data over dogma” podcast.
The Bible is a book with multiple authors that had completely different conceptions of God and that borrowed local traditions for their own.
For example, the belief in one god is believed by scholars to be a later change to the Bible. In that region, it would be more common for the belief to be that there’s a God of a land or nation with their power bound to that land. The world was viewed as one with a battle of the gods rather than being one with a supreme ruler.
This is why the Bible so often disagrees with itself. Because each author had their own motives and were sometimes responding to each other in their writings.
The extended universe is far too large and contradictory. Really we need Disney to just come in and buyout the whole Abraham franchise and just reset everything back down to a few core stories. And maybe forget about the Christmas special.
I am being pedantic here, but “cruelty” doesn’t seem like quite the right word. If you made something, like a drawing or a story, and then got rid of it, the point isn’t to cause suffering, but rather to throw it away. “Indifference” would fit better. And… either way, a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work? “Omnipotent” there being a relative word, that the ancient people’s would not have been able to distinguish b/t forms like your more common garden-variety space alien (e.g. 2001 Odyssey) all the way up to external-reality entity (e.g. The Matrix).
Anyway my point is that it is people who are the ones that are cruel, b/c we are no better than anyone else, yet we delight in causing suffering. The only other animal I have ever heard of who shares that trait is the Chimpanzee, who btw also just so happens to be the closest living relative that humans have on this planet. \s on that being a coincidence ofc, when we share ~99% genetic similarity.
Another take: God is an asshole and modeled men after himself. Explains a lot if you think about human history, doesn’t it?
And of course there is no god, only delusions to keep the population under check. Humans are simply assholes by nature.
Well, omnipotency is out, I believe. An omnipotent god needs, by definition, be equally able and likely to be exceedingly cruel as wellwilling. The question is, why would such a god hav given Noah the task of building an arc in the first place?
And the question of humanities “free will” is another nail in the coffin. Either humans only have free will for as much as whatever whim the omnipotent god allows for, or of the free will is immutable, then there is one thing the “omnipotent” god can’t do, and thus omnipotence is out…
They did do something wrong though, or else they would have been on the ark with Noah.
Especially the babies. They know what they did.
How would that work out for the animals? Did every single one commit sins except for one male and one female of every species?
Animals aren’t people
I never said people, I said needlessly cruel to all living beings. There was no reason to kill almost all animals and yet god did it in the story.
I kinda hate these types of comics. There really isn’t any reason why this should be a comic other than the writer’s medium of choice. The message gains nothing from the visual aspect. The comic could really have been improved if the author showed what the characters are talking about, but we just get a wall of text with a crudely drawn woman to represent the opposition. Also, the art has no appeal and is generally ugly.
I’m pretty sure that water in a fire hose goes faster than 0.1 inches per second.
Fun fact: all of the oldest recorded stories - in addition to the Torah there’s the Sumerian writings that are even older - have a story of a worldwide flood event.
The caveat being that to them, the “world” that was flooded was the Mesopotamian basin area. In the millennia since then, the known world has grown to encompass the entire planet, so the context informing our interpretation has shifted, and we need to expend proper effort to shift it back, to what they would have meant back then, not what it would mean to us today if similar words had been used, e.g. if the story were told in English.
The children’s story myth seems to have arisen from an irl event, just not the one that the picture books repeatedly show & tell (obviously for reasons of profit, they sell what people will buy and enjoy looking at, rather than focusing on historical accuracy).
Here’s the thing, society formed around agrarian settlements. What do you need for crops, livestock, AND people? What makes transporting your goods easier? If you said water, you get a prize. Many of our settlements, both modern and historic, were near water sources. Water sources flood. Inevitably, water sources experience thousand-year flood events, and completely swamp a huge area, maybe even wiping out one or more settlements. As you start going back in history, you also start dealing with glacial dam rupture events, which also almost certainly scoured away everything downstream and would have seemingly come out of nowhere at all.
The phenomenon of the global flood myth is really just that people live near water, and when you live near water, shit happens.
No we don’t have to do that, not at all.
Floods happen, sometimes big floods happen, humans tend to live near water, so when big floods happen lots of humans die. The stories grow by being retold, eventually you get the mother of all floods stories.
I don’t have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific. We have secular history and from there we can know what really happened. Now, the Bible is consistent on very little, homophobia is one of those things it is consistent on. The solution is not to be an apologist for the text. The solution is throw out that bronze age crap and be nice to the LGBT.
I did this crap when I was working my way out of religion and no one has to make the same mistakes I did. It wasn’t really slavery, it wasn’t really racism, it wasn’t really genocide, it wasn’t really homophobia, it wasn’t really oppression…rip the band-aid off! It was slavery, it was racism, it was homophobia, it was brutal oppression.
You don’t have to do anything, true. Feel free to completely disregard the Bible.
That being said, don’t pick up Lord of the Rings, ignore it’s genre and declare it pointless because Hobbits don’t exist. The Bible has so many genres, because its a collection of stories and books rather than a single book, and you probably aren’t aware of most of those genres because they no longer exist.
Again, feel free to completely ignore the Bible if you’d like, but saying that it’s a mistake for anyone to try and figure out what one of the most influential books in the history of mankind was originally intended to say is wrong.
Brilliant rebuttal. Won’t make your vile children stories correct however.
Apologetics only comes in a few basic forms
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The disproven
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Convoluted versions of the disproven
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Violence and mockery
I have debated with you before, and you were using Ehrman-level arguments to try and gymnastic your thoughts into believing that the Gospels were somehow not written by who they are attributed to. According to you, apologetics come to violence. On this platform I have seen people literally call for the wiping out of Christians, one even advocated wiping out all Christians, Jews and Muslims (that’s 4 billion people). If you want to use mental gymnastics to try and convince yourself that the Bible is somehow not real so you don’t have to worry about facing God, I won’t stop you. But it doesn’t make it any less real.
“debate” is not how I would describe whatever it is you think you are doing.
If you want to use mental gymnastics to try and convince yourself that the Bible is somehow not real
Of course the Bible is real. It is as real as any other work of fiction. Batman and Jesus are equally real in sense that people can talk about them.
you don’t have to worry about facing God, I
There is no god and you are not a fucking mind-reader.
I won’t stop you.
Don’t need your permission, Christian. Your lot ain’t running things anymore. Can’t exactly burn me at the stake.
Sorry not sorry that Jesus never existed and you are wasting your life on a 20 century old con.
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What’s an allegory?
I don’t see why we have to have these debates. It did not literally, historically happen. Conundrum solved. It’s a story that can still have religious, ethical, spiritual meaning. Aesop’s Fables didn’t literally happen either, they are still meaningful stories.
Even like Maus did not literally happen as written (the holocaust did happen, to be clear, but it happened to humans), the point is a level of abstraction to get at deeper truths.
Some people think everything literally happened but some people think they are literally married to Severus Snape. Nobody’s getting through to those people, least of all with a Lemmy comment or a cartoon. Don’t worry about them.
Because the Mythicism debate is important to have.
Scenario 1: there was a street preacher illiterate magician who operated for about six months and one day got an idea to attack Rome and Rome didn’t care for that. The result was the world’s first and second biggest religion.
Scenario 2: Paul took the James con and spent about 40 years working on it. Improving it. Make sure it brought in the crowds. The result was very interesting stories that involved the whole family in an experience and it was that that ended up taking over the world.
Frankly the first scenario is pretty scary. That crazy guy with the cardboard sign saying the end is near? All it takes is him to get shot by the cops and civilization will be in ruins 300 years later. I am much more inclined to believe that the entire practice of baptism, communion, singing together, waiting for Holy Spirit to speak through you, demon casting out and the plot skeleton of Mark came from a determined guy who ruthlessly not only stole from the best but was willing to be a workaholic with his material.
So yeah it does matter. All humans on earth are shaped by these events. If we are such that a person with no original ideas can still win we are in a lot more danger than if we lost to a person who had a new idea every Sunday.
Even if the biblical Jesus was a real guy who said literally everything ascribed to him he would have still been hundreds of years behind the thinking of the Empire.
There are 100000 of these happening every year. Every kind of outlet is working on squeezing the fuck out of events like that. You can drop a pin on the ground and the news will try to make the world out of it. Constantly trying to jumpstart some bullshit.
Jesus and “his followers” are more akin to an early psychedelic/hippie movement with all the ideas that came with it. They were in a way the pioneers of society, the one that eventually brought an order of higher level equality.
They were in a way the pioneers of society, the one that eventually brought an order of higher level equality.
No. They criminalized non-christianity and supported slavery. In terms of ideas they had nothing new.
Who were “they”?
Christians
K
Math checks out. ( 28800 ) 👍
Not sure I ever heard this angle before, but among all the impossibilities of Noah’s ark, this is definitely a good one.PS: in metric that would be approximately 10000 mm rain per hour.
So what does “equivalent to a firehose” mean in this case? What area per firehose? A football stadium per firehose? An Olympic swimming pool? An average room? A jar?
EDIT: I think it’s about one firehose per 10x10 meter area, so like a couple of rooms worth of area. It’s not that bad. I bet rainfalls like that do happen for a few minutes in taiphoons and such.
I assumed a firehose per area the size of a firehose edit: some quick googling says a 6cm firehose dumps about a cubic meter per minute, which works out to 500 meters of water per minute if we measured it like we measure rain.
30ft per hour is about ten meters per hour.
Yeah, no I would not say that is like a firehose.
about a cubic meter per minute, which works out to 500 meters of water per minute
Rain is usually calculated per m2.
1 m3 per minute is 60 m3 per hour.
10k mm rain per hour is 1 liter x 10k = 10 m3 per hour.So I make it out to about a sixth of your firehose. Which still makes it way worse than any kind of weather you would call rain.
I’m not sure what other analogy would be closer?Edit: Corrected to the quote I actually responded to.
Wow can’t believe r/atheism can make comics
Why?
Can they? It’s more text than comic.
That’s very true, calling it a comic is a bit of a stretch
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