So god told Noah to go into the ark with his whole family, which consisted of his wife, his three sons and their wives. Eight people. And god tells him also to take seven clean animals with him, and all the other animals should just be paired. Guess he changed his mind about the whole "two of every kind" thing. Oh, and seven of every kind of bird.
Seven days is all Noah has left before he knows the world will be destroyed. A whole week. Do you think he was busy doing all those things he'd put off doing, or do you think he just sat in his bedroom and stared at the wall? Cause I would've done the latter.
That's the thing, too. God didn't give Noah a chance to save humankind, didn't give him a chance to warn anybody, didn't tell him he could even divulge this information. Just, "I'm going to kill everything. Everything except you. Do you feel special now?" Must've been a depressing week for Noah, listening to people in the marketplace looking forward to the next season, or families planning for weddings that would never take place. Watching mothers carrying around their sons or daughters in their arms, whose futures are now just a short, watery doom. Or even little things like, "I'll pay you back next week." Nope. No you won't.
This is what really bothers me about teaching this particular story to children. Talk about desensitization.
"Noah did all that the Lord commanded him." Yeah, well, not much of a choice, is there?
So Noah was six hundred years old when he went into the ark with all the animals that didn't really fit and his whole family of sons and daughters-in-law. "On the seventeenth day of the second month" (that's unnecessarily precise) the whole world flooded from the bottom and the top. It rained for forty days and nights.
I'm assuming Noah didn't take any fish or waterfowl with him on the ark. That would just be stupid. But the author, for the fourth time now, talks about all the animals on the ark with him. And "Then the Lord shut him in." Presumably saying, "See you when everything you've ever known is dead and gone. Have fun!"
For forty days the waters increased, and Noah and the ark went up, up, up, and everything that had been land dwelling was totally and utterly f*cked. And after forty days, when the ark was at least twenty feet above the high mountains, the waters and the rain stopped.
The flood lasted (after that, I imagine) for a hundred and fifty days. That's about five months. I'm not sure what calendar they were using at that time, but it was almost half a year. At least two seasons of hanging out on a big boat with no one to talk to except some animals and your family. Noah probably spent a lot of time tending the animals.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
A new year
It's been a little while since I've been able to get time away to read the bible, let alone make sport of it. I intend to pick up where I left off, though, and hopefully continue for quite a while (it's a long book!) and not stop and start.
Thanks for any of you that actually care about it.
-Millicent
Thanks for any of you that actually care about it.
-Millicent
Monday, May 14, 2007
Argument Against the Story of Noah's Ark
Take your average fundamentalist christian, you know, the kind that doesn't 'believe' in evolution. They usually say something like, 'god could've done things that way if he'd wanted to, but he didn't, and the reason we know is because we have the bible.' The bible, to them, disproves evolution. Any pseudoscience or flim flam they use to refute the facts are merely vehicals for them to 'prove' that the bible is incontrovertable fact. That every word in it was meant to be there, and that every word was divinely inspired. Meaning, there were no 'reception problems' with the authors, they took no liberties with the information god gave them to inscribe, that this was god using them as pencils.
I intend to show that the story of Noah's ark all but disproves that the bible could be divinely inspired, incontrovertable written truth directly from the mouth of god.
The first given in the argument is described above, it's the 'the bible is true and not false in any circumstance, and the things that happened in it really happened exactly the way they are described' hypothesis.
The second given in the argument is that god created the world as it appears today, with no evolution working on a 'seed' population by mutation making all the different life forms possible. No, say the creationists. The world, as we know it, with all the animals about which we now know, was created by god just like it says in Chapter 1, and everything that you see around you and that we know about was present and accounted for at the time of Noah.
If the first assumption is true, that means that the measurements handed down to the author of Genesis were correct, that they didn't accidentally put a decimal in the wrong place or anything. But if the second assumption is also true, then every animal that exists around us now existed back then. And all the animals we know about now (for instance, all the species of beetles) would not fit on an ark whose measurements are defined in Genesis. I'm sorry.
There are two rebuttals possible: the one is that man DID get it wrong, and misunderstood what god was saying. That will throw the whole rest of the book into question, because it could never be so convenient that the author is mistaken only when he is contradicting modern day knowledge.
The second rebuttal is that god, in essence, used magic. That god, the all-knowing spiritual entity that saw fit to make everything by hand and then put all these fossils in the record that contradict his own word, described an ark that would not accomodate two of every kind of animal that exists in the world, and resorted to 'mysterious' means to get all those animals onto the boat. Abracadabra!
Neither of these responses is very appealing. Far be it from me to insist that I know everything (I don't, for instance, know what happens to us after we die, but I suspect it has something to do with decomposition) but the fact that no one knows how god would have fit all those animals onto that boat really bothers me. Shrinking ray? Atomizer? I am harking back to an earlier age in the western world, when men discovered physical laws, such as the laws of motion, and attributed these laws to a god that had set up a beautifully mathematically simple order to the world he created. I am invoking the spirits of the scientists that many now claim only studied science in order to bring to light the underlying order that they felt god had put there. If you shoot a cannonball in the air, you can calculate where the cannonball will land. And you will be right over and over again. And this, say the believers, is because of god.
God has the complex in his corner when it comes to evolution. Nothing as complex as a light sensing organ could have evolved due to enviromental pressures and genetic mutation. God has to be there. God has the simple in his corner when it comes to math. Nothing as elegant and simple as F=ma could be found to be true if it weren't for god making the order. They attribute every kind of pattern and order that their minds percieve to god, regardless of whether that order even actually exists! So for human knowledge to have discovered the lives and deaths of stars and single celled organisms to be constantly hounded by a group of people so spiritually stupid as to cling to a notion handed down to them from the stone age--that there are 'some things we can NEVER know because GOD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS'-- confounds scientific thought and confounds the society which thrives because of it
The things we SHOULDN'T know are vast. The things we CAN'T know should compel us to ask questions of our own faculties. The things we DON'T know should give rise to scientific inquiry. The things these theists SAY they know are convieniently things that can never BE known, and therefore, can never be proved nor disproved. The kernel of truth at the heart of any and all monotheistic religions is that they are a virus that can only sustain itself by acquiring new hosts, and that love and kindness practiced by christians is only a delivery method for their parasite.
In conclusion: either we live in a world where the physical laws are subject at any moment to the whims of a deity that has not spoken in 2000 years, or the laws stick, and the god that created them--who may or may not be bound by them--would abide by them because he CAN. All Genesis Chapter 6 had to contain to prove the existance of the christian god was measurements for an ark that could contain two each of every animal in existance: presto, you've got your proof. But it doesn't.
The measurements for the ark in Genesis no doubt comfortably contain two of every animal that the authors knew about. And that's what disproves this book being the word of an all knowing god.
I intend to show that the story of Noah's ark all but disproves that the bible could be divinely inspired, incontrovertable written truth directly from the mouth of god.
The first given in the argument is described above, it's the 'the bible is true and not false in any circumstance, and the things that happened in it really happened exactly the way they are described' hypothesis.
The second given in the argument is that god created the world as it appears today, with no evolution working on a 'seed' population by mutation making all the different life forms possible. No, say the creationists. The world, as we know it, with all the animals about which we now know, was created by god just like it says in Chapter 1, and everything that you see around you and that we know about was present and accounted for at the time of Noah.
If the first assumption is true, that means that the measurements handed down to the author of Genesis were correct, that they didn't accidentally put a decimal in the wrong place or anything. But if the second assumption is also true, then every animal that exists around us now existed back then. And all the animals we know about now (for instance, all the species of beetles) would not fit on an ark whose measurements are defined in Genesis. I'm sorry.
There are two rebuttals possible: the one is that man DID get it wrong, and misunderstood what god was saying. That will throw the whole rest of the book into question, because it could never be so convenient that the author is mistaken only when he is contradicting modern day knowledge.
The second rebuttal is that god, in essence, used magic. That god, the all-knowing spiritual entity that saw fit to make everything by hand and then put all these fossils in the record that contradict his own word, described an ark that would not accomodate two of every kind of animal that exists in the world, and resorted to 'mysterious' means to get all those animals onto the boat. Abracadabra!
Neither of these responses is very appealing. Far be it from me to insist that I know everything (I don't, for instance, know what happens to us after we die, but I suspect it has something to do with decomposition) but the fact that no one knows how god would have fit all those animals onto that boat really bothers me. Shrinking ray? Atomizer? I am harking back to an earlier age in the western world, when men discovered physical laws, such as the laws of motion, and attributed these laws to a god that had set up a beautifully mathematically simple order to the world he created. I am invoking the spirits of the scientists that many now claim only studied science in order to bring to light the underlying order that they felt god had put there. If you shoot a cannonball in the air, you can calculate where the cannonball will land. And you will be right over and over again. And this, say the believers, is because of god.
God has the complex in his corner when it comes to evolution. Nothing as complex as a light sensing organ could have evolved due to enviromental pressures and genetic mutation. God has to be there. God has the simple in his corner when it comes to math. Nothing as elegant and simple as F=ma could be found to be true if it weren't for god making the order. They attribute every kind of pattern and order that their minds percieve to god, regardless of whether that order even actually exists! So for human knowledge to have discovered the lives and deaths of stars and single celled organisms to be constantly hounded by a group of people so spiritually stupid as to cling to a notion handed down to them from the stone age--that there are 'some things we can NEVER know because GOD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS'-- confounds scientific thought and confounds the society which thrives because of it
The things we SHOULDN'T know are vast. The things we CAN'T know should compel us to ask questions of our own faculties. The things we DON'T know should give rise to scientific inquiry. The things these theists SAY they know are convieniently things that can never BE known, and therefore, can never be proved nor disproved. The kernel of truth at the heart of any and all monotheistic religions is that they are a virus that can only sustain itself by acquiring new hosts, and that love and kindness practiced by christians is only a delivery method for their parasite.
In conclusion: either we live in a world where the physical laws are subject at any moment to the whims of a deity that has not spoken in 2000 years, or the laws stick, and the god that created them--who may or may not be bound by them--would abide by them because he CAN. All Genesis Chapter 6 had to contain to prove the existance of the christian god was measurements for an ark that could contain two each of every animal in existance: presto, you've got your proof. But it doesn't.
The measurements for the ark in Genesis no doubt comfortably contain two of every animal that the authors knew about. And that's what disproves this book being the word of an all knowing god.
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