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.
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.
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.
If you look into flood myths, there are also hypotheses involving comet or asteroid impact flooding, which could have happened at many other times.
By the time the Greeks determined the circumference of the earth, this flood would already have been a legend and a fading cultural memory. It almost definitely would be oral history and not recorded in any physical form. What proof could anyone have that it didn’t cover the whole world?
Not knowing about glaciation or interplanetary objects it would be extremely hard for the people of the era not to have decided that some spiteful god had tried to wipe out the entire earth.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
As i said, by definition. If there is anything holding such a deity from doing one thing, or the other, it is unable to do all things, thus not omnipotent.
I think it would help if I knew what definition you were using, I’m not sure where the equally likely part comes from. I think there would be a distinction between an omnipotent being being able to do a thing and choosing to do a thing.
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.
a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work?
What is different between this and a mother or father killing their own child because they ‘created’ it? I would say that if you create a thing with feelings, thoughts, flesh, and blood, you have the responsibility to take care of that thing, and if you don’t that is cruel.
DO parents create their children, really, or do they just FAAFO? But if you write a computer program, don’t you have rights to it? The latter is a thorny question indeed, if it develops sentience. So it seems like both yes, at a lower level, but then no once it rises to a similar level as you. Similar to how an embryo or even more so an unfertilized egg is not a “person” yet (except in the Southern USA), but an adult is. Or some people may argue that Might Makes Right, which most of us would disagree with, but e.g. the likes of Putin would still push forth. So there is indeed no consensus there, and likely never will be. But my main point here, besides simply listing some of these factors involved, is to say that the act of Creation seems to involve more than just fucking, even knowing full well that a child would result from that act - full Creation involves a much deeper commitment, hence a higher degree of ownership.
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.
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.
“The world” back then also was something like a town and its surrounding villages. It probably just rained really heavy for a few days, flooded some village in a way that never happened before and the only explanation was “God’s wrath”.
I believe most of religious stories can be explained by people talking shit.
There was a flood after the meditteran salinity crysis, which happened partly due to lowered pressure in the nord causing the ground in the south to recede after the ice was gone (think of pressing in a balloon). There was a theory that the black sea flood (was half as big prior) due to this was what we know as the great flood, with humanity living mostly around there at the time, but i think it was refuted, because the flooding happened over generations there.
The thing with glacier seas happened mostly in scandinavia, gb, up there, creating the english channel (the heck? German it is Ärmelkanal).
There’s another, funner, theory, whereby a feedback loop in tectonic movement makes the plate boundaries heat up and the plates move ever faster (for a while till it calms down again). The ocean floor thereby becomes hot and more buoyant on the mantle beneath - so ocean floor rises and continents sink.
That theory is backed up by some proper plate simulation by a respected scientist, but as far as I know it was never developed past the initial simulation work and intriguing result.
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.
I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c “they made it up”, but b/c it actually did really happen… and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.
Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie “Knowing” with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie “The Matrix” did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.
Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe “the world-wide flood event” to a child, it would be both “yes it actually did happen” (most likely) plus also “it wasn’t quite like that”.
I don’t think you have to even assume that every Mesopotamian flood myth is referring to the same event. The Tigris and Euphrates were very prone to massive flooding.
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.
Now you are muddling. There is a difference between studying the book as a piece of historical literature and saying it doesn’t say exactly what it says. If someone wants to waste as much time as I have doing that, they are welcome to. If someone wants to pretend it is NOT homophobic I will push back.
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
Allow me to be unnecessarily aggressive here, for the lolz obvi, by stating that yes, you do.:-) *I* did not make this comic, you were the one who chose to show it. *I* was not the one who started this conversation, you were. If you start something, then you need to be intellectually honest about whatever it is that you choose to discuss? Or else you, who has your rights, may get downvoted and talked back to by others, who likewise have their rights as well. Bury your head in the sand all you wish - and congrats btw for overcoming your false religious start in life - but if you are going to poke your head up and demand that your POV be considered by everyone who reads your posts on Lemmy, then by that self-same action you are choosing for it to be evaluated as well? That isn’t (just) me, it is the very nature of logic and reality that demands that! Otherwise, how is your POV any different than theirs? “I am right and you cannot question that!” - really?, that is the route that you want to go with here?
Be better.
Anyway, it’s a thought. Do what you want with it:-D.
And fwiw, Jesus hung out with “sinners” (literal prostitutes and stuff), and literally commanded (anyone who wants to claim to follow Him as a literal God) to “love one another, especially those you disagree with” so… even if this thought bugs you, you are actually “following the teachings of Christ” (heavy emphasis on that word teachings) more closely than the actual genocidal Christians who (mis-)use the other words in the same book to bludgeon people to (literal) death. Anyway, don’t fall down to their standards - I encourage you: choose to be better my fellow human being!:-) Don’t fall back into old patterns, just now on the other side! :-P (even if, as Jesus Himself literally has preemptively agreed with you, it may happen to be the correct one, at least insofar that regardless of what someone else chooses to do or not do, it is no reason to be ungentle with them, as you say it is better to “be nice”, is it not?:-D)
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.
You’re kinda being a dick about it though, honestly.
Jesus definitely existed, there are historical records of him and his crucifixion. The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable (by others, I don’t believe in space wizards except Jedi) but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
What’s super gross is you’re othering them based on their religion.
You’re kinda being a dick about it though, honestly.
Yeah yeah I suck, get in line and take a number.
Jesus definitely existed
Better tell these losers. Not a single one noticed his existence until after the Mark Gospel was written and widely published. Not a single shred of contemporary evidence, an inconsistent biography, a story that even removed supernatural events stretches plausibility to the breaking point.
there are historical records of him and his crucifixion.
Very well show me the contemporary record.
The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Which makes it even worse. They were good at it and yet the records for Jesus aren’t there. The first Roman official that even mentions the Christians was after they had been around for decades and he doesn’t even seem to know what rank Pilot had.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
See, you aren’t really interested in any intellectual argument. It’s a heart issue. You think you know better than God and want to be your own God. Hence the deconversion.
Wait… sorry… you’re actually claiming that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were actually written by those people as named in those gospels?
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.
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.
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.
No, it is a one dimensional number(excluding time) that works for any area. If you put two containers down in a rain, one 1m^2 area and one 1dm^2 area, both will collect water up to the same level.
Yes there will be 100 times as much water in total in the large container, but the height when spread in the container will be the same in both.
concentrating the water fall from a 1m^2 area into an area the size of a firehose is not how rain works. Rain happens spread out over the whole area.
When you calculate the volume, it’s usually per m2. I quoted the wrong part.
So when you compare to a firehose, you must compare the volumes.
Tightly packed firehoses wouldn’t make any sense, because that’s not how firehoses work.
At least that was my interpretation.
that would be approximately 10000 mm rain per hour.
Also known as 10m/h.
Or departing from the realm of the useful completely, that’s water pooling at roughly 1/30 of the speed with which an elite cyclist ascends a particularly steep gradient.
With a catchment area of “planet earth”, that’s roughly 5,100,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water an hour. That’s more than twice the amount of beer Lemmy Kilminster drank in an entire year!
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.)
Kids should be taught about religion, because religion is an important part of society.
Notice I said taught about, not taught. They shouldn’t be taught that any religion is true, just that “Here’s a popular religion, and here’s what these people believe.”
Good teachers do it, both in history and french class, but that’s often an overlooked part of the teaching plan. In part because our government ask teachers to teach more and more things a year, and no days are added to said year. (The teaching about religion, I mean. Teaching religion is still illegal in public schools, and must be optional in privates ones.)
Also, the “peoples” who govern us might prefer us ignorant of those things. (And many other, to be honest.)
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.
In the Bibles defense, it didn’t just rain:
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
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.
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!
Welp, this is sending me off on an hour+ wikipedia kick. Thanks!
My work here is done! ;)
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.
If you look into flood myths, there are also hypotheses involving comet or asteroid impact flooding, which could have happened at many other times.
By the time the Greeks determined the circumference of the earth, this flood would already have been a legend and a fading cultural memory. It almost definitely would be oral history and not recorded in any physical form. What proof could anyone have that it didn’t cover the whole world?
Not knowing about glaciation or interplanetary objects it would be extremely hard for the people of the era not to have decided that some spiteful god had tried to wipe out the entire earth.
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.
Yes, it’s not only rain even as per Quran
and
Fair point! Its been a while since I heard this in my childhood, but I remember them explicitly telling us “it rained” without any other source.
Granted, we were children lol but if the artist had a Sunday school like mine then that likely is the basis for missing that bit 🙃
In the Bible’s offense, it probably wasn’t even originally a flood story.
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.
https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/there-ocean-below-your-feet#:~:text=The finding%2C published in Science,surface%2C is trapped inside rocks.
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.
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.
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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.
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…
How do you figure that?
As i said, by definition. If there is anything holding such a deity from doing one thing, or the other, it is unable to do all things, thus not omnipotent.
I think it would help if I knew what definition you were using, I’m not sure where the equally likely part comes from. I think there would be a distinction between an omnipotent being being able to do a thing and choosing to do a thing.
And it didn’t even accomplish anything.
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.
What is different between this and a mother or father killing their own child because they ‘created’ it? I would say that if you create a thing with feelings, thoughts, flesh, and blood, you have the responsibility to take care of that thing, and if you don’t that is cruel.
DO parents create their children, really, or do they just FAAFO? But if you write a computer program, don’t you have rights to it? The latter is a thorny question indeed, if it develops sentience. So it seems like both yes, at a lower level, but then no once it rises to a similar level as you. Similar to how an embryo or even more so an unfertilized egg is not a “person” yet (except in the Southern USA), but an adult is. Or some people may argue that Might Makes Right, which most of us would disagree with, but e.g. the likes of Putin would still push forth. So there is indeed no consensus there, and likely never will be. But my main point here, besides simply listing some of these factors involved, is to say that the act of Creation seems to involve more than just fucking, even knowing full well that a child would result from that act - full Creation involves a much deeper commitment, hence a higher degree of ownership.
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.
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.
Yeah and the kangaroos had to be yeeted back to Australia and were not allowed to stop anywhere on the way
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.
Right? Like people in the local area may have been terrible, but there were other people.
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.
“The world” back then also was something like a town and its surrounding villages. It probably just rained really heavy for a few days, flooded some village in a way that never happened before and the only explanation was “God’s wrath”.
I believe most of religious stories can be explained by people talking shit.
There was a flood after the meditteran salinity crysis, which happened partly due to lowered pressure in the nord causing the ground in the south to recede after the ice was gone (think of pressing in a balloon). There was a theory that the black sea flood (was half as big prior) due to this was what we know as the great flood, with humanity living mostly around there at the time, but i think it was refuted, because the flooding happened over generations there.
The thing with glacier seas happened mostly in scandinavia, gb, up there, creating the english channel (the heck? German it is Ärmelkanal).
Mediterranean Salinity Crysis, new Greek prog rock band name
There’s another, funner, theory, whereby a feedback loop in tectonic movement makes the plate boundaries heat up and the plates move ever faster (for a while till it calms down again). The ocean floor thereby becomes hot and more buoyant on the mantle beneath - so ocean floor rises and continents sink.
That theory is backed up by some proper plate simulation by a respected scientist, but as far as I know it was never developed past the initial simulation work and intriguing result.
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.
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.
Upvoting, b/c that too:-).
I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c “they made it up”, but b/c it actually did really happen… and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.
Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie “Knowing” with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie “The Matrix” did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.
Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe “the world-wide flood event” to a child, it would be both “yes it actually did happen” (most likely) plus also “it wasn’t quite like that”.
I don’t think you have to even assume that every Mesopotamian flood myth is referring to the same event. The Tigris and Euphrates were very prone to massive flooding.
Yes. I mentioned it as “supporting evidence”, but good clarification.
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.
Now you are muddling. There is a difference between studying the book as a piece of historical literature and saying it doesn’t say exactly what it says. If someone wants to waste as much time as I have doing that, they are welcome to. If someone wants to pretend it is NOT homophobic I will push back.
Allow me to be unnecessarily aggressive here, for the lolz obvi, by stating that yes, you do.:-) *I* did not make this comic, you were the one who chose to show it. *I* was not the one who started this conversation, you were. If you start something, then you need to be intellectually honest about whatever it is that you choose to discuss? Or else you, who has your rights, may get downvoted and talked back to by others, who likewise have their rights as well. Bury your head in the sand all you wish - and congrats btw for overcoming your false religious start in life - but if you are going to poke your head up and demand that your POV be considered by everyone who reads your posts on Lemmy, then by that self-same action you are choosing for it to be evaluated as well? That isn’t (just) me, it is the very nature of logic and reality that demands that! Otherwise, how is your POV any different than theirs? “I am right and you cannot question that!” - really?, that is the route that you want to go with here?
Be better.
Anyway, it’s a thought. Do what you want with it:-D.
And fwiw, Jesus hung out with “sinners” (literal prostitutes and stuff), and literally commanded (anyone who wants to claim to follow Him as a literal God) to “love one another, especially those you disagree with” so… even if this thought bugs you, you are actually “following the teachings of Christ” (heavy emphasis on that word teachings) more closely than the actual genocidal Christians who (mis-)use the other words in the same book to bludgeon people to (literal) death. Anyway, don’t fall down to their standards - I encourage you: choose to be better my fellow human being!:-) Don’t fall back into old patterns, just now on the other side! :-P (even if, as Jesus Himself literally has preemptively agreed with you, it may happen to be the correct one, at least insofar that regardless of what someone else chooses to do or not do, it is no reason to be ungentle with them, as you say it is better to “be nice”, is it not?:-D)
Did chatgpt get messed up again?
Brilliant rebuttal. Won’t make your vile children stories correct however.
Apologetics only comes in a few basic forms
The disproven
Convoluted versions of the disproven
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.
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.
There is no god and you are not a fucking mind-reader.
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.
You’re kinda being a dick about it though, honestly.
Jesus definitely existed, there are historical records of him and his crucifixion. The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable (by others, I don’t believe in space wizards except Jedi) but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
What’s super gross is you’re othering them based on their religion.
Yeah yeah I suck, get in line and take a number.
Better tell these losers. Not a single one noticed his existence until after the Mark Gospel was written and widely published. Not a single shred of contemporary evidence, an inconsistent biography, a story that even removed supernatural events stretches plausibility to the breaking point.
Very well show me the contemporary record.
Which makes it even worse. They were good at it and yet the records for Jesus aren’t there. The first Roman official that even mentions the Christians was after they had been around for decades and he doesn’t even seem to know what rank Pilot had.
Yeah yeah I suck. Get in line and take a number.
C’mon man, even Ehrman knows that’s stupid 🤣
See, you aren’t really interested in any intellectual argument. It’s a heart issue. You think you know better than God and want to be your own God. Hence the deconversion.
Take it up with Erhman. He is a big boy and can defend his views. Still waiting for the supposed evidence for your zombie in this “debate”.
Again with the mind reading.
Wait… sorry… you’re actually claiming that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were actually written by those people as named in those gospels?
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.
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.
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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.
No, it is a one dimensional number(excluding time) that works for any area. If you put two containers down in a rain, one 1m^2 area and one 1dm^2 area, both will collect water up to the same level.
Yes there will be 100 times as much water in total in the large container, but the height when spread in the container will be the same in both.
concentrating the water fall from a 1m^2 area into an area the size of a firehose is not how rain works. Rain happens spread out over the whole area.
When you calculate the volume, it’s usually per m2. I quoted the wrong part.
So when you compare to a firehose, you must compare the volumes.
Tightly packed firehoses wouldn’t make any sense, because that’s not how firehoses work.
At least that was my interpretation.
a cubic meter per minute is what the firehose outputs, so thats over approximately a dm^2 not an m^2
which comes out to a 500m high column
Also known as 10m/h.
Or departing from the realm of the useful completely, that’s water pooling at roughly 1/30 of the speed with which an elite cyclist ascends a particularly steep gradient.
With a catchment area of “planet earth”, that’s roughly 5,100,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water an hour. That’s more than twice the amount of beer Lemmy Kilminster drank in an entire year!
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
It was an elective for me in the very far north, too. I took “Bible as Literature” where it was just like any other English class.
Kids should be taught about religion, because religion is an important part of society.
Notice I said taught about, not taught. They shouldn’t be taught that any religion is true, just that “Here’s a popular religion, and here’s what these people believe.”
Good teachers do it, both in history and french class, but that’s often an overlooked part of the teaching plan. In part because our government ask teachers to teach more and more things a year, and no days are added to said year. (The teaching about religion, I mean. Teaching religion is still illegal in public schools, and must be optional in privates ones.)
Also, the “peoples” who govern us might prefer us ignorant of those things. (And many other, to be honest.)
Melted is the wrong word here, isn’t it? More like filled up in minutes, sunk and become a watery grave for all the unfortunate souls within.
I’m pretty sure that water in a fire hose goes faster than 0.1 inches per second.
Wow can’t believe r/atheism can make comics
You just need to have faith.
Can they? It’s more text than comic.
That’s very true, calling it a comic is a bit of a stretch
Why?
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.
No. They criminalized non-christianity and supported slavery. In terms of ideas they had nothing new.
Who were “they”?
Christians
K
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What’s an allegory?
Ask the bible belt Christians that.