drought under the flood: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/droughts.htm
salt apparently had different physical properties during the flood: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/saltandmeteors.htm
"Look it wasn't a global flood.."
by Qcmbr 118 Replies latest watchtower bible
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artemis.design
I am retyping that last statement due to my terrible typing errors.
For people that believe in global flood. One thought.. saltwater sea life and fresh water sea life don't mix. Upsetting the delicate ecosystem would mean most sea sea life would have died out. Or were they taken on the ark also? it would have been a very big boat!
Additional thought: Whales are included in my comment on sea life. What about the whales?
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DagothUr
There was a global flood after the melting of the ice. But it was not 6000 years ago. More like half a billion years ago, after the Cryogenian era, when Earth was a white, frozen planet.
Smaller ige ages also resulted in smaller meltdowns. Some valleys were flooded, but it was not a global event. The last ice age seems to have ended 15.000 years ago. I have also found marine fossils on top of some 500 meters high hills in the countryside. I still have them in my collection. My pride is a small oyster shell found on a sand-hill, in the village graveyard. If you look a the arc of the Carpathian mountains, you can easily imagine them as a sort of barrage holding a sea inside the arc, over nowadays Transylvania. And the marine facies shows there was a sea in that place, known as the Badenian Sea, somewhere in the miocene era, around 15 millions years ago.
There is enough scientific proof that there were floods and sea-level drops, that land emerged from the sea due to various geologic processes. Natural causes produced natural effects. The Biblic deluge has nothing to do with this and remains just a myth. There is enough evidence to prove this, but most religious fundamentalists are just not interested and probably not intelligent enough to understand geology specific language.
For those who are interested about how marine fossils can be found on top of mountains, there are a lot of studies available on the Internet. But geology is a tough science, hard to understand. It's much easier to believe in a fairy-tale about a supreme being that raised the land from the sea in just one day.
Brotherdan, I completely agree with you. When you throw away a part of the Bible, you might as well throw the whole thing. That is what I did. And I have no remorse on rejecting Jesus either.
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wobble
I do not agree that the absence of a global flood in any way makes for the necessity to "throw away the Bible".
What people like brotherdan and other "fundie" types need to do is learn how to read it, and learn what the original language words mean and how they were used. they also need to recognise when a passage is poetic, allegorical, hyperbolic etc. etc.
To read the Bible as the WT taught you, as literal in all cases, and as their tranlation interprets it for you, is to lose the original thoughts of the writer in nearly all cases.
Just as an example, they will read the bit in Chap.7 (?) of Genesis where it says that the waters covered every mountain under Heaven, and think that is to be taken literally, not from the perspective of someone living in basin-like Mesopotamia.
They will take the word Eret ,earth, to mean the whole globe without looking at how the word is used elsewhere, they do the same with the Gk. word Ge, (from which we get Geology etc. ) it does not always refer to the whole globe, in fact quite rarely does it.
It frustrates me that the farely recent, in bible scholarship terms, tendency to literalism causes people to make such silly mistakes in interpretation.
The Bible's flood account no doubt, like the similar ones in other cultures, that remember the sending out of the birds and the number of survivors etc, remembers a devastating flood that killed most of the worlds population, from the perspective of the writer of the story.
Read the Bible for what it is, a collection of writings from many different periods of history and different cultures and theologies, and you will get much more from it.
If you are one who believes the Bible is the word of God in some way, surely you should want to read it in such a way as to get the real sense of it, even a non-believer like me wants to do that.
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PSacramento
I am one of those that has said a few times that the Biblical account, like the other accounts from that area, probabaly mean a very intense ( perhaps several intense) floods that would have led ancient man to believe it was "global" or just use the wording "all the land" or "all the orld" or "whole world" and to describe it as such, in the typical way ancient man wrote things - like Alexander conquered the world and the roman empire ruled the world.
There is evidence to suggest a vast flood in the area in question and not just a small one but one so significant that multiple culture speak of it.
Of coruse there are also flood accounts over the history of various cultures around the world, but certainly a global flood of the LITERAL method and proportions as stated in Genesis would have left UNDENIABLE evidence and would have caused such change son the earth that life as we know it would NOT be life as we know it.
I think that many believer feel that if the bible is NOT literal, if it can't be take as such that, SOMEHOW, God doesn't exist, I guess because God is dependant on the bible and not the other way around?
Makes no sense to me personally, In the Bible we have the word of God and that word is personififed in Christ, nevertheless, it was written and it was copied by faliable Man and as such, we must be critical when soemthing that we "know" is not such to ask why it is not.
Augustine spoke of this 1700 years ago, this is NOT a new debate at all.
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sir82
I've just finished reading "The Jews in the Time of Jesus" by Stephen Wylen. One of the more interesting things it explains therein is the concept of "history" for ancient peoples.
In Jewish writings (i.e. the Bible), "history" was not written to present a factual re-telling of events as they literally occurred. Exaggerations & embellishments were accepted as normal & expected.
Literal accuracy was of little importance to the writers. The idea was, write things down which explain (not necessarily re-tell) history, or which present moral truths.
When reading of the flood, in the mind of the original target audience, no one would have thought "wait a minute - that couldn't literally be true because (for example) fresh water fish can't live in a salt water environment, & vice versa." The simple-minded may have thought it was literally true, the more intelligent may have recognized it as a religious myth, but both groups would have recognized the important moral lessons involved.
Regarding Jesus' mentions of the flood: Who was his target audience? For the most part illiterate, uneducated, simple country folk who didn't have a lot of time for "deep thought".
They would have learned, for all their lives, the story of the flood from listening at the synagogue every week. It really didn't matter to them if it was literally true or not - they didn't have time to think about it. Their overriding concern was bringing in enough food for that day or that week for their family.
If would have needlessly complicated matters, likely beyond his audience's comprehension, for Jesus to explain the physical & geological & biological reasons why a global flood could not have occurred.
Instead, he treated it as "real", just as "real" as it was always presented in the synagogues & in the writings. I.e., real enough to impart the lesson he was trying to get across.
It would undoubtedly strike the writers of the Bible books as the most hilarious thing they had ever heard, if told that thousands of years after their death, 21st century "Bible inerrantists" would twist their words into pretzel shapes trying to make them fit as "literal history".
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simon17
The case about a global flood is this:
Jesus believed in it and spoke of it. If I reject the flood, then I reject Jesus. That is why I take an all or nothing approach to the Bible. When you begin to throw out 1 part, you end up having to throw out the whole thing.
Just saying: Earlier in this thread you were amazed how people find the FDS is not true and then reject the Bible. That is not at ALL how it happens. Instead, you've just described how it happens. You start researching various aspects of the Bible like the flood, like the creation account, etc etc and you can't just eliminate one thing. Once you remove one domino, all the rest quickly start to fall. And if you go in and remove... 10 dominos, well the whole gig collapses quite quickly.
So you can really have two choices: It says what it says and I believe every word. I cannot accept a world without God so I cannot consider any evidence contrary to the Bible.
Or you can say: I'm going to examine everything with an open mind. If something doesn't check out, then I'm going to eliminate it and face the consequences.
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PSacramento
WHat Jesus said about the Flood:
Luke quotes Jesus, "Everybody kept on eating and drinking, men and women married, up to the very day Noah went into the ark and the Flood came and killed them all" (Luke 17:27). Again, there is a very similar quote found in Matt. 24:38-39, but no allusion to the comment in Mark or John.
SO what did Jesus say? not what we THINK or want him to say, but what was the written record of what he said:
Just like in the days of Noah, where people were getting on with their lives and the flood came and killed them ( the people) all.
Not the whole world mind you, just the people that were interacting with Noah.
Now, Jesus was showing that, just as people were oblivious during the time of the flood, so shall they be at his second coming.
Now, some have said that since his second coming is to be witnessed by the whole world that it means the flood was global, but thatis truly putting words in the mouths of the writers since Jesus did NOT say the whole world was flooded did he?
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BurnTheShips
Now, some have said that since his second coming is to be witnessed by the whole world that it means the flood was global, but thatis truly putting words in the mouths of the writers since Jesus did NOT say the whole world was flooded did he?
Even if he had, he was using an cultural reference to make a larger point. It was a spiritual teaching.
If there had been a world wide flood less than 6000 years ago, the geological evidence would be staggering.
The ice age, which was farther back in time, has left huge, unmistakable evidence. Most of N. America was covered in ice sheets.
Global flood that covered the mountains? There is no geological evidence. There isn't even enough water.
BTS
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simon17
Those are some weak arguments PSac.
The wording of the Genesis account CLEARLY indicates that all humans and animals and the entire world was destroyed by the flood.
Jesus talks about how "everybody" and "all" the people were swept away in a flood. And he is referring to an account in which the WHOLE WORLD was flooded.
It is very clear what he is speaking about and referring to by these statements.
What you are suggesting is that the Genesis account is inaccurate (although inspired?), that Jesus came and invoked this inaccurate account to describe a future event giving most people a misimpression, but while technically not saying something to contradict the actual true version of the Genesis account (a local flood) that only he and heavenly entities know about (and which a few geologists would eventually figure out 2000 years later).
Seriously, who is putting words in someone's mouth here???