How much water is on the earth?
United States Geological Survey
Update - Talk # 6 THE FLOOD OF NOAH’S DAY AND YOU
by ttdtt 25 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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freemindfade
I can't believe any human being still believe this crock in the age we live in. -
fulltimestudent
Flood Legends:
Most (if not all) early human settlements were located close to rivers (for continuity of water supplies). If heavy rains occur, then the rivers flooded, and settlements may have been wiped out and some loss of life likely occurred. So it would seem that flood stories were often told, and likely (since they were oral stories) stories would be telescoped together.
When writing developed (and practical writing materials including a medium to write on) the stories that had been memorised for ages began to be recorded in writing. But there was a practical problem, what you could write was limited by the medium (and whether we would ever read it now was dependent on its durability) on which someone could write the story.
There were limits on the amount of writing material available. Around the Euphrates/Tigris river system, clay was used, so we have a flood story that endured, written on a clay cuneiform dated to the seventeenth century BCE and earlier. (That's much older than "Israel," so we'd have to say that it is the original flood story, and the Hebrew version (in Genesis) was developed from the Sumerian version.
You can read some details of the Sumerian version at this link: http://www.livius.org/fa-fn/flood/flood2.html
In part the author says:
Quote: "The Great Flood: mythological story about a great destruction that once befell the earth. There are several variants; the Biblical version is the most famous. The possibility that there is a historical event behind the story (a local flood in southern Babylonia in the twenty-eighth century BCE) can not be excluded."
Quote: "The story of the Great Flood has its origins in Sumer, the southern part of ancient Babylonia. Even though the younger Epic of Atrahasis and theEpic of Gilgameš, written in Babylonian, change many details, they continue to refer to Šuruppak as the city of the hero of the Flood story, even though the Sumerian name of the hero, Ziusudra, has been changed into Atrahasis or Ut-napištim. In the youngest Babylonian version, by Berossus, we see the original name return: testimony to the vitality of the Sumerian story, which has been called Eridu Genesis by modern scholars.
Quote: "The story survives on a cuneiform tablet from the seventeenth century BCE, of which only the lower third survives. However, this is sufficient to establish that the pattern described above was already present. However, there are small differences. The Eridu Genesis must have begun with the Creation of Man, but continues with the establishment of kingship and a list of cities. Then comes the list of antediluvian rulers, which confirms the pattern again, and the supreme god Enlil's decision to destroy mankind. The reason was recorded on a missing part of the text, but may have been the noise men created, as it is in the later, Babylonian texts."-----------------------------------
More to come.
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Finkelstein
One such flood is said to have roared through the region with a wall of water 2,000 feet [600 m] high,
Bullshit
Actually there was one an ocean that transverse right through the middle of North America.
The WTS and their intellectually dishonest agenda to prove Noah's flood did clearly occur and its not just ancient mythological folklore is one of the reasons why religious institutions are dishonest and corrupt institutions.
For example they state that there are sea shells on the top of the highest peaks of the Himalayas, as viable evidence that there was a global flood to make that occur but dont they tell factual truth that there is physical evidence of strata depth in meters that that particular geographical landscape was once an ocean floor not just a thin top surface of shells as they assertively imply.
Take a bit of evidence and twist it to suit another imposing agenda is the game they play.
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kepler
"They exhibit a unique drainage pattern that appears to have an entrance in the northeast and an exit in the southwest. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet dammed up Glacial Lake Missoula at the Purcell Trench Lobe. A series of floods occurring over the period of 18,000 and 13,000 years ago swept over the landscape when the ice dam broke. The eroded channels also show an anastomosing, or braided, appearance....
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I was living in Washington state going to graduate school mixing engineering and astronomy together back in the late '70s - and coincidentally, that was when the eastern Washington scablands were offered up as an analog to the flow features seen on Mars. One of my courses was taught by a geologist active in the space exploration program and - he was probably aware of the history of the scabland controversy dating back to the 1920s. I was not.
But in this context, I can now see some other ramifications. Especially when about a year ago, I ended up digging up an article about J. Harlen Bretz and his theories about the scablands, written in the journal Science (22 December 1978).
One of the reasons I had pulled it up was on account of someone's argument about a universal flood occurring some time around 4000 years. My counter to that was that there were a lot of independent flood features around the world that appeared to older than that, independent of each others age - and they hadn't been wiped away. Since this one was attributed to a particular glacier lake and dam structure which burst around 10,000 years ago, I argued that a universal flood should have eroded this one away as well. Ditto for the Grand Canyon. But there they are.
Just for the record, that argument didn't cut much ice (sic) that time with the Noachian viewpoint. But then when I look at the original 1978 Science article, Noachian theories appeared to be in the background in the 1920s as well. The controversy then was whether the gradualist theory in geology was as gradual and non-catastrophic as many 19th century proponents had come to accept. Bretz was met with a good deal of skepticism even though he had tons of field data from Eastern Washington for a flood of enormous magnitude.
Here's the article conclusion:
The Spokane flood controversy is both a story of ironies and a marvelous exposition of the scientific method. One cannot but be amazed at the efforts to give a uniformitarian explanation for the Channeled Scabland and to uphold the [then prevalent] framework of geology as it had been established in the writings of Hutton, Lyell and Agassiz. The final irony may be that Bretz's critics did not appreciate the scientific implications of Agassiz's famous dictum, "Read nature, not books." Perhaps no geologist has lived and understood the spirit of those words than J. Harlen Bretz."
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How much of the controversy in the 1920s and successive decades was based on a reaction in the geology community to anything that smacked of field work supportive of Biblical notions, is hard to determine from the article. But over the years catastrophism has been assimilated into both geology and evolutionary biology without the "framework" of the sciences collapsing. Impacting asteroids, volcanic explosions producing more devastation that nuclear bombs and melting glacial lakes have all had a role in both geology and biology over periods of tens of thousands of years, not to mention millions. But oddly enough, when you consider the connection with the martian surface, the flood model of Biblical literalists seems to apply more neatly out there, what with submerged hydrospheres and impacts causing gushers that sweep over frozen wastes...
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OnTheWayOut
With only 7 minutes allowed to mention the historical records backing up a global flood just a few thousand years ago, it just doesn't matter. It's still a case of "The Bible says so, and we must believe." -
Finkelstein
Religions aren't honestly endeavored to seek the truth rather they are avowed to defer the truth whenever in formation is presented in opposition to ancient mythological writings and ruins their identifying assertion of spiritual divination.
Human ignorance is the fuel and supporting catalysis to which they derive their power from.
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Clearview
I was gonna mention the catastrophic flood that resulted when the ice dam holding lake Missoula broke. (the last time) It's a subject that's pretty close to home considering I'm sitting in Missoula MT right now haha. In certain spots you can still see where waterlines once were on the sides of mountains, and there are other geological features that indicate this area was once underwater.
In the mid 2000s I flew commercial from Seattle to Spokane over the Washington desert/Badlands. It was obvious that a massive amount of water had rushed over that area at one point. I saw huge ripples probably a mile from peak to peak in the terrain like you would find on a sandy beach, and Delta type formations.
These features were pretty clearly defined and that (last) flood was supposed to have happened 10,000 - 14,000 years ago.
If the whole earth had been flooded a measley 4000 years ago, it would be blaringly apparent everywhere on the planet.
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Half banana
There will come a time soon, perhaps that time has already arrived, when it will be infantile and laughable to believe the Bible to be literally true.
How can the JW org live with itself to cavalierly dismiss the scientific evidence and then dishonestly claim science supports their view? They expect their followers to be idiots.
It is brazen dishonesty to distort evidence... and they will be exposed.... and the JW org like the dinosaur it is; will have to join its kind in extinction.
