Noahs flood debate

Religion and Secularism
21

I just read the full article. It has everything to do with archaeology and nothing to do with Noah’s ark. The most relevant paragraph is the last. Here it is.
“But he does not claim to have found the landscape of Noah. " We really cannot say in any way, shape or form that this is the biblical flood. All we can say is that there has been a major flood, that people were living here when it happened. We prefer to stick with the facts -and who knows where those facts will lead us.”

The title of this article is wholly fallacious in asserting in bold, blue colored type that “Evidence found of Noah’s ark flood victims” very, very misleading. I repeat; the myth of “Noah’s Ark” is a childish fairy tale.

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22

And I believe you’re saying we agree.

They found evidence of pre-flood communities, that part is fascinating, though once again, in hindsight not surprising. Of course people lived near the river.

I actually live on a post-Pleistocene river bank, with the current river, (a one time Gold Metal Trout stream), having evolved into a seasonal creek over the past couple decades. So I have a visual for what that flooding must have looked like. That little riparian strip of river, dry since about three weeks ago, is 5-10 (dog walking) minutes from up at the edge, with fertile fields down there in the old river bottom up and down from where we’re at.

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mid July, after the big rains, although they really didn’t effect the creek level - it’s all snow pack. Down falls been getting soaked up.

All that used to be a raging river for a few hundred/thousand(?) years

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Yeah, I’m trying to change the subject. Perhaps redirect, try to imagine what life was like for those people who actually experienced these things.
And all the places that saw the radical changes, that Earth climate-optimal triggered.

23

And now we’ve turned it all on its head and heading for a balmy greenhouse planet, or possibly worse.

Time to reflect on humanity’s pageant, or would greek tragedy be a better label for our reign over Earth?

24

Yes CC, water is the omnipotent agent of planetary change and always has been.

Greenhouse gases will wreak global havoc for centuries to come and a massive die-off is already underway. What brought us to this point in our history is widespread disregard for the natural world we inhabit and a good part of that disregard stems from religious dogma. The bible explicitly states that man shall have “dominion” over the natural world and hence by inference subdue the natural world and that’s exactly what western civilization has done.
When I rail against silly fables like Noah’s Ark it’s not because I want to have a good laugh at folly, it’s because religious orthodoxy has fostered a belief system that places little or no value on our natural world. Nothing has such a truculent hold on the human mind as religious dogma and it threatens our collective future.

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:+1:
Sure I can appreciate a little railing against such follies. I’ve done a bit of that myself in the day. Besides made for a little discussion. Now getting older, thinking about things more from a going out perspective, since I’ve lost my faith in the future.

What a trip it’s been hanging with my young 30ish daughter and husband, listening to their plans and dreams, in another age it would like, you guys are going to nail it. Instead I want to cry. So I listen and once again find myself in the position of fervently I’m wrong, while reminding myself, living today is where it’s at, soak in the fleeting moment for all it’s worth, then stash it away, another memory to cherish in an interesting life…

I would so love to be wrong about this pit in my belly when I listen to the latest weather headlines from around the world. Think roller coaster, still it feels like we’re actually at the top of first really serious fall off the cliff. With clowns in charge of society. To be followed by worst weather in most places. The hydrology cycles itself with all that extra moisture available for storm systems too suck in, rain simply isn’t going to be what it used to be. Then the Gulf Stream… and then, and then . . .

So I’m onto philosophy these days, you might find some of this interesting?

My homemade philosophical underpinning.

(7.01) An Alternative Philosophical Perspective - “ Earth Centrism ”

(7.02) Appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mindscape divide

(7.03) Being an element in Earth’s Pageant of Evolution

(7.04) It’s not a “ Body-Mind problem ” it’s an “ Ego-God problem .”

26

Thanks for the links CC, I just read the article on “Earth centrism.” It seems modern humans of the 21st century need to re-acquire something our ancestors were more attuned to, an inborn sense that we are vitally connected to the earth that gives and sustains all life. It seems the lesson must be learned the hard way.

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Hello everybody. In my consideration Noah is a really nice poem. I think, it maybe happened. However it cannot be read as something literal. I mean the tale is an oral tradition made by iliterated sheppers. It maybe happened due to the lost of the ice caps and the consequent raise of the ground beneath the ice. I mean, in case we wipe out an ice column of several km for an area of hundreds or thousands of square km, then this vector problem solving will rise the ground beneath the ice in relation to the force involved. The area, the perimeter and the orthography will dramatically change. The sea level rise will get far larger than the expected for the quantity of inland ice. Thereafter the writers of those poems didn’t used the number zero and any too large time frame wasn’t possible to get recorded clearly. The matter of the boat and so forth is in my consideration quite poetical. However there are ancient maps are displaying free ice Antarticas and those are quite different. Those maps just included an Antarica found in more ancient maps. Perhaps their original maps as a whole are getting quite coincident with our world at certain sea levels.

28

That’s rather curious.

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I don’t understand. In my consideration it maybe happened a flood, due to several paleontologic traces as well as the quantity of miths or poems of many cultures were talking about. I think, we should observe Noah as a time when the few were advising the food was coming were marginated and ridiculized. Those few where trying to save or put in high ground as many species as possible and were seen as fools for those who were enjoying the burning of the environment. There after for sustain this during mileniums the few iliterated survivor had an oral tradition of a tale, like a movie.

30

It rather does sound like a movie.

Thanks

31

Thank you Michael.

The thread title is semantically meaningless as debate isn’t possible. I don’t know what we’d call the process of trying to save the young from anti-scientific bias. Education. Luckily we live in representative democracies, the UK being low end first rate, the US being high end second rate, where our representatives tend to be better educated than those they represent and tend to ameliorate the extremes.

32

This is the only necessary reasoning that applies for the story. I always thought that the story was odd and was not satisfied with those arguing against it by asserting that floods occurring all the time as a significant contribution to it. They didn’t need that story to explain any flooding, no matter how devasting some would have experienced any. It was only the fossil evidence that needed some justification that made this and other stories essential to make sense of with respect to questioning our origins.

Fossils would have been a shock to many and the evidence of such water-based creatures was what led most to theorize an Earth that begun under water. This actually was introduced in Genesis’s creation introduction that begins with assuming the void and then a separation of the “waters” above from the “waters” below. [The actual term for what has evolved into the biblical term, “water”, had to have actually been fluids in meaning.]

They also intepreted life as coming from water initially (and correctly). BUT,…the “Noah’s Ark” story was also what made most pre-scientific and other reasonable secular minds to also notice the giants below a certain level in the then known geographic layers, which had a sudden dissappearance, and thus the recognition of a pre-human stage that evolved into the stories about a dual level set of gods such as the Greeks maintained in their own pantheon of ‘gods’. They needed to guess how and why these giants are no longer around. Thus, the Ark story, a common secular explanation by all most travelled peoples, had entered into the accepted origin stories of the day. […and wisely so!]

So, this particular story has nothing to do with the fact regarding common floods but ONLY to the fossil records, even if we lack any direct evidence of this in historic records. There likely existed those who collected such evidence as proof but likely destroyed by the time of Christianity.

Note that the religious do not appeal to the science. So while it might entertain the non-religious to presume it helps, it doesn’t. I found the most effective way is to demonstrate how the stories can come about without a religious interpretation, by showing how the names and other words used actually hint at the secular roots of words we even use today in many languages, and any ancient wisdom by actual intellectual scientifically minded people. But just as children are impatient to pay the needed time to understand the logic, the stories would get passed on without care until an overwhelming amount of illiterates later on had lost the use of both the words and the prior historical relevantce as it relates to everday living in relatively ‘modern’ times for them. I proposed a theory on the old CFI site (maybe in archives here?) regarding two such important necessary stages of early civil/post tribal evolution that used temples and sacrifice which later became the features of only religion as it has passed down to us today.

[I think the books that became the bible and most other religious scriptures or stories from ancient times had real secular roots that just devolved into religion rather than the other way around. Thus the stories were highly unlikely to be taken serious by the average person back then as literal. Telling things in story with characters were necessary for both the memory and for teaching regarding most of real facts or issues by all different people, especially where different cultures met up in trading. The use of the names of these characters also helped translate language among the distinct people from differing places, cultures, and languages.]

33

That makes no sense. Can you unpack it a little?

Why don’t think the very dramatic flooding that happened all over about 10,000 years ago, would impact the stories people pass down for generations

34

Just to get this out of the Bible, here’s a flood story from where I live. We don’t have mountains. There were floods, from glaciers holding back lakes, then breaking. Geology is very rich here too, lots of fossils. I don’t know what the indigenous had to say about them.

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I’m saying that the ancients would not have a concern to tell a story about destroying all prior animals without a reason to believe animals that used to exist no longer exist. Otherwise…

…the flood story would be simply be about the origins of ALL animals FROM original man, like this one.

The roots of the "Noah’s Ark’ versions have a prior creation of man that God opted for a flood that kills off most species except those that were saved. But without knowledge of fossils, there can only be the simpler theory of Earth arising out of the “waters below”. This is why I mentioned the original opening of Genesis. They presumed also an origin of all “solids” from a prior state of “fluids”, of which most theorized that water is chaotic like the air.

So most isolated civilizations at least should share a theory that the Earth formed from a prior liquid state as it represents more closely the place of the perfect void above (the ‘waters’ representing the sky) with the “spirit of God hovering” representing the addition of those magical fluids that seem necessry for giving life (the air) or death (smoke).

So Noah’s ark version flood stories make sense only in light of seeing the fossils of prior life whereas they also theorized prior to that, the origin of ALL beings as coming from water. The earlier origin stories that use flood myths without a prior extinction are just coincidental to believing that everything came from water.

EDIT: Extra points of notice related to this…
Note also that the prior origins of the Judeo-Christian beliefs derive much of religion from Egypt regarding origins. “Nun” (see the ‘none’ there?) is the origin of the void/fluids below; “Nut” (see the ‘nothing’ there?) is the void/fluids above; and “Nile” (see the ‘nil’ there?) refers to the fluids that give life; They all relate to fluidity and only when these were created did “Aten” (that perfect circle that represents supreme ‘SOLidity’) then fell as “Atum” (see the “autumn” in there?) and only THEN created “Adam” (the Earthly fallen things representing the hard solids).

[P.S. "the term “Eden” is included in this as the rise of Aten. Notice that the difference in consonents of the terms. They are ‘d’, ‘t’, ‘n’ and ‘m’. They just varied the words based upon the SOUNDS that they relate to nature. dDeN, aTeN, aTuM, aDaM. This is an example of the roots from Egypt that define religious names that worked their way into what later became Judaism and all that followed (EVErything else). ]

36

Where are you getting this?

37

That’s stretching it even for me.

38

Yes, the English language was already being constructed from the old languages…

Hey, we have Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and a day named after Saturn, Saturday.

:man_student:

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Here is a more authoritative site

Mother language of all languages

A hypothesis put forward by Professor Joseph Greenberg and his colleagues (Stanford University) holds that the original mother language developed in Africa among early Homo sapiens. Their ‘Proto World’ map would show how Homo sapiens spread across the world, taking their language with them. That single language, which the Professor calls the Mother Tongue or proto-world, diverged naturally over time into the several thousands of diverse forms spoken today. Read more [here]

(NOVA | Transcripts | In Search of the First Language | PBS)

An idea of of what this tree would look like is shown below:

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and

Sorry, this is my own interpretation of observations based upon relating the terms from the various religious and historical sources in general. The biblical terms come from prior sources and I was showing how there exists certain common themes going back to Egypt (and other cultures) Language evolves too. And we won’t have actual ideal ‘proof’ of this other than circumstantial guesses precisely because the direct linking evidence for language evolution is politically destroyed by modern cultures replacing the old.

The original languages first evolved by sounds of nature, intentional alterations of spellings and/or definitions meant for isolating (and burying if possible) the old historical links.

The dDeN, aTeN, aTuM, aDaM represents the fact that the ancients did not use vowels originally and they interpreted word non-arbirtrarily with very extreme significance. The names, Eden, Aten, Atum, and Adam, referenced directions of east, west, up, and down, with specific ways to link the sounds. The rising sun is ‘eden’ (and why it was the name of the birth place of man), ‘aten’ is the highnoon sun, ‘atum’ is the falling sun, and ‘adam’ is the ground (location of where the sun would be). The reason I used small and capital letters was that you can see a pattern where they swapped the d, t, n, and m in an order. To see it clearer, write these in a diamond like,

…Aten…
Eden…Atum
…Adam…

and remove the vowels,

…T.N…
D.N…T.M
…D.M…

Furthermore, words had multiple meanings and ALL biblical names reference meaningful everday words. You don’t have to believe it. But then I’d question whether you actually interpret the religious scriptures as literal or severely retarded. We really have not evolved that much and it is an arrogant assumption to assume that ancient civilization were made up idiots.

I mentioned these because you can then see the circumstantial links that make the apparently ‘arbitrary’ stories of religious material as having a secular origin AND that people back then were quite ingenious. This has been very helpful also for me to affectively help the religious literalist change their opinions without insult and in ways that allow them to still not think their whole life investment in their scriptures is not at a loss. There is still a ‘liberal’ value to religion that is not as harmful and can be productive for many. And even for those of us who are athiest, it can help make us less intolerant towards them.

You’ll warm up to it. All the names in the bible had meaning. I thought I saw someone reference a Canadian movie about the Catholic missionaries teaching the natives how to read the bible by you or someone else here? [Black Robe] The movie illustrates something we don’t realize as significant when novel: that something as seeingly trivial as written words were ‘magical’ to the Natives witnessing how symbols on a piece of paper can precisely transfer one’s literal speech word for word to another person. Words meant something far more significant to the ancients and why you cannot presume what I wrote as a ‘stretch’.