*Warning Religion* Noah's Ark Never Happened.

[FijiStudios]

http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/

http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter6.html

From Jason Long (according to the article)

I have felt that this may just be worth posting, I do not want to have this thread go off the deep end. Let us keep this logical and it could be a nice debate.

Here it goes:

Rather than bogging you down with some mind numbing scientific data, I’ll try to present the various problems in an organized yet fun to read manner.

A Dose Of Common Sense
Let’s begin by looking at this highly questionable account from a common sense point of view. Within the story, we have a god who has to modify virtually all of his creations for the solely expressed reason of the people having become wicked and evil (Genesis 6:5), yet wicked and evil people continue to exist throughout the Bible. Right off the bat, the foundation for the story fails to make sense. Why would an omniscient god have to destroy all of his work for a specific quality that he knew would continue to exist even unto this very day? The flood was for naught, yet God carried out his horrific genocide anyway. I find this to be the most disturbing and perhaps the most ridiculous premise ever conjured by the human mind.

The author clearly tells the story from the perspective that God had just recently realized the way the world had become. This, too, fails to make sense because biblical authors repeatedly claim that God is omniscient. By definition, his omniscience requires him to have known at the time of Adam and Eve that he would later desire to start from scratch at Noah. This unnecessary and foreseeable correction is hardly the logical course of action for an omnipotent god to take. If you let your inhibitions loose, however, it should be painfully obvious that the original authors of Genesis didn’t consider these salient points as they were writing. One might even ask if they bothered to proofread their work. Such casual observations work well against the hypothesis of an all-knowing god, a consideration we’ll revisit repeatedly. At this point in our study, one must already concede that God is not omniscient, God behaves in an acutely illogical manner, or the flood simply never took place for the reasons provided by the Bible.

Appallingly, God drowned unborn children in the flood. This indisputably necessary consequence of his actions should ironically put a huge kink in the pro-life arguments from the church. God aborts countless unborn children for the questionable sins of their parents, yet the church expects society not to do the same? Infants and young children who do not possess the intellectual capacity to tell right from wrong were also casualties of the flood! How could they be among the wicked and evil? These are hardly the actions of the loving God depicted in the New Testament. The innocent children didn’t deserve the fate God inexcusably dealt them, end of story. Helpless animals also suffered the horrible fate of the children. However, given the apparently twisted love that God has for smells from animal sacrifices (Genesis 8:20-21), that last point shouldn’t have been very surprising to someone familiar with the Bible.

No one has ever found the enormous ark even though we know its final resting place is among the mountains of Ararat located around present-day Turkey (Genesis 8:4). All evidence presented as proof of the ark’s discovery has been admitted to be a hoax, proven a hoax, or withheld from testing. Although one could reasonably anticipate that someone would have discovered a tangible piece of evidence from the craft if it hasn’t decomposed, multiple expeditions have turned up absolutely nothing. While many people claim they have evidence for the ark being conveniently underground, no one has ventured to exhume it from the earth.

Genesis, the only known source of Noah’s story, has several hundred additional problems in need of answers before we can consider it a reliable historical source. No known individuals recorded this particular version of the global flood myth until nearly 2000 years after the floodwaters vanished. Since oral accounts of an event can obviously undergo drastic changes even over a few generations, there’s really no telling how much alteration the story incorporated before existing in its present form. In short, as we have seen and will continue to see, the book of Genesis is not a reliable source of historical information by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[FijiStudios]

Observable Facts In Any Day And Age

A little known but important piece of information about the Genesis flood is that the extremely similar Epic of Gilgamesh in the Sumerian legend predates Noah’s story by at least one thousand years in the written form and at least five hundred years for the setting. The similarities between the two tales are so remarkable that we cannot write them off in good conscience as mere coincidences. In the earlier flood legend, Utnapishtim receives instructions and exact dimensions on how to construct a large ship to avoid an imminent flood (as does Noah in Genesis 6:14-16), takes animals and his family aboard to preserve life on earth (as does Noah in Genesis 6:19-7:1), lands the ship on a mountain after the flood has stopped (as does Noah in Genesis 8:4), releases a dove and a raven from the ship in order to aid his search for dry land (as does Noah in Genesis 8:6-11), and burns a sacrifice after the flood for the gods who find its odor pleasing (as does Noah in Genesis 8:20-21). Because several additional minor parallels exist, I would encourage everyone to read Tablet XI of the short epic in its entirety in order to appreciate fully the similarities between the two legends. Since the Gilgamesh tale is the earlier version of the two, we can only surmise that the authors of Genesis copied the Epic of Gilgamesh or inadvertently patterned the story of Noah’s ark on an even more ancient flood legend that we have yet to discover.

Records of flourishing civilizations in China, Egypt, Babylon, and Mesopotamia exist straight through the flood era of 2500-2000 BCE. This contingency creates a stack of obvious problems without planned solutions because the flood supposedly vanquished the inhabitants of these regions. If this was the case, why do we now possess their journals made before, during, and after this global deluge? The flood would have certainly destroyed these societal accounts if God were truly guilty of genocide. If people from each region somehow managed to survive and continue these records, why isn’t the cataclysmic flood mentioned in their accounts? In fact, no sort of catastrophe on this level exists anywhere in the written histories of any society during any era. On the other hand, records of ancient civilizations frequently mention several local floods. This is quite possibly the most compelling reason why many Christians have abandoned a global flood hypothesis in favor of a local one, a proposal rapidly gaining in popularity that I will debunk toward the end of this chapter. Had the authors known their descendants would one day be able to date these civilizations, the story most certainly would have been different from what we have today.

Most people with a reasonable level of geographical education are aware of the existence of Mt. Everest, which has an apex well over five miles above sea level. In apparent contrast, the ancient Hebrews, as we discussed before, probably never ventured too far from their homeland and therefore knew of no such formation. If the textual description of the flood is assumed to be accurate, we know that this enormous mountain would have to be covered by fifteen cubits (about twenty-two feet) of water during the flood (Genesis 7:19-20). Had the authors been truly aware that there were mountains extending this far above sea level, they would have certainly altered the story again in order to bring the water requirement back to a somewhat more feasible level.

To this day, no one has ever been able to assemble a seaworthy boat the size and best possible composition of the ark even though the all-knowing God personally dictates the dimensions. Experts in the field agree on the long established three-hundred-foot limit for a wooden vessel, yet the ark extends 50% beyond this repeatedly verified limitation. In addition, researchers carried out their attempts to break the three-hundred-foot barrier under tranquil weather, not conditions indicative of the apocalyptic downpour depicted in Genesis. Furthermore, the modern boats used in these attempts had the benefit of iron braces to maximize cohesion. There’s no indication that Noah used any metal when building his ark. If we accept the Bible as an accurate account of the event, Noah was necessarily confined to “gopher wood” and pitch (Genesis 6:14). Had the authors ever attempted to construct a craft the size of the one that they championed as a global flood survivor, they would have failed miserably. Consequently, the size of the ark would have been yet another factor of the flood story in desperate need of adjustment.

Hundreds of millions of animal species existed during the time of Noah, many of which could have been observed by undertaking a long journey from Mesopotamia. Had the authors spent more time researching animal life in the neighboring regions, they probably would have come to appreciate the futility in fitting two animals of every kind onto the ark. As a result, the authors would have to expand the ark’s dimensions in order to accommodate Noah’s guests. At the same time, however, the boat’s larger design would further handicap its credibility as a seaworthy craft.

A surviving population of eight could not have rebounded quickly enough in order for the equally comical Tower of Babel story to take place only one or two centuries later. While God commands Noah’s family to be fruitful and multiply, seemingly providing the story with a mirage of plausibility, the population simply could not have grown to more than a hundred or so even under ideal environmental conditions. Could this minuscule group of people have possibly posed a threat to God by building a tower so immense that Heaven would become attainable to them? Ignoring the obvious reply that God doesn’t live on top of the sky, Noah’s future descendents certainly didn’t have the resources to accomplish this assuredly impossible task.

 

[CompOrange04GT]

inb4 tl;dr

 

[Uncle Meat]

So when are you going to give Dr. Jason Long the credit for writing this?

U.M.

 

[svtfocus2cobra]

Tl;dr...

 

[FijiStudios]

The Water Fiasco
As the title of this section indicates, we’ll now look at a few problems created by the water supply, most notably the lack thereof. The amount necessary to produce a flood of global proportions far exceeds the current amount available on, in, and above the earth. While this doesn’t prove the water wasn’t present, the burden of proof is on those who defend the story to provide it with a plausible explanation. As the “fountains of the deep” (Genesis 7:11) contain only 1% of the necessary water, 99% would have to fall from the supposed sky ocean. Thus, the goal of covering every mountain with only forty days’ worth of precipitation would require a rainfall of six inches per minute, which is far too tremendous for the primitive ark to remain intact. In great contrast, we would typically expect a rainfall of only six inches per hour from a category five hurricane. One can only decide that this requirement is hardly feasible to carry out, especially when the heat generated by the impact of the raindrops on the flood surface would have been more than sufficient to boil the water and prevent it from rising.

The water originating from underneath the earth’s surface would erupt with noxious gases, such as sulfuric acid, that would make their way into the atmosphere and cause the earth to become uninhabitable. The lava expected to accompany the subterranean water would also bring the already scalding liquid to its boiling point. Furthermore, if the oceans somehow miraculously avoided vaporization, nothing would have prevented the water from receding beneath the earth once the outpour ceased unless the pressure exerted by the water above collapsed the previous passageways. Such a scenario would then force the water to remain or evaporate. Since the water is no longer present and the clouds in the supposed sky ocean don’t have the capacity to hold this amount of liquid, we can only assume that it mysteriously vanished. However, the problems of the water’s source and destination are moot points since the entire ocean should have almost instantaneously been converted to steam. In fact, the steam rising from the ocean beds would have been concentrated enough to boil off the planet’s atmosphere.

Keep in mind that this tale would make sense to the early Hebrew who apparently believed there was an oceanic reservoir in the sky (Genesis 1:6-7). If a mysterious canopy of water existed above the earth at one time, as some Christians have offered as an explanation for the origin of the water, the mass of liquid would raise the atmospheric pressure enough to cause a dramatic increase of oxygen and nitrogen to toxic levels. Such a canopy would also extend beyond the ozone layer, a problem concluding with the denaturation of water molecules by high levels of ultraviolet light. If you subtract the requisite of covering the world’s highest mountains, of which we have no reason to believe the story’s inventors were aware, most of these problems would conveniently disappear. As it stands, however, the necessary water requirement is too extraordinary for covering the earth’s surface by fifteen cubits.

 

[Uncle Meat]

Why not just give the link to Dr. Long's website and quit plagiarizing his work.

An Introduction to Biblical Nonsense

U.M.

 

[FijiStudios]

So when are you going to give Dr. Jason Long the credit for writing this?

U.M.

I did, you guys post fast. All you gotta do is google this if you don't believe it is from jason long

 

[RDJ]

So when are you going to give Dr. Jason Long the credit for writing this?

U.M.

because that would mean he had ethics.

on another note the bigger questions is why did he even bother to post this crap, and then claim he "doesn't want it to go off the deep end"? that is the most absurd comment I think I have seen on SVTP in quite some time. he has been here long enough to know that religious threads ALWAYS turn into a cluster **** and ALWAYS go off the deep end.

and on yet antoher note .. who gives a shit anyway TL;DR

edited to add: the author is full of shit and so is the OP. based on this paragraph alone.

"Genesis, the only known source of Noah’s story, has several hundred additional problems in need of answers before we can consider it a reliable historical source. No known individuals recorded this particular version of the global flood myth until nearly 2000 years after the floodwaters vanished. Since oral accounts of an event can obviously undergo drastic changes even over a few generations, there’s really no telling how much alteration the story incorporated before existing in its present form. In short, as we have seen and will continue to see, the book of Genesis is not a reliable source of historical information by any stretch of the imagination."

the fact that just about every culture in the world has a myth of a great flood puts the lie to this. while it is true that Gensis is the only one that mentions Noah specifically he leaves the impression that the other stories can be dismissed without investigation or thought.

 

[FijiStudios]

Why not just give the link to Dr. Long's website and quit plagiarizing his work.

An Introduction to Biblical Nonsense

U.M.

Check the first post. Damn I am not even done quoting him. :lol1: Does anyone check links anymore?

 

[Uncle Meat]

Nice ninja edit Fiji.

U.M.

 

[wurd2]

...in before a religious member reminds us that we cannot apply our standards of logic and morality to Yahweh!

.

 

[FijiStudios]

Tl;dr...

Read the bible and yet this notion that may bring logic to the topic is not worth your time? Seems pretty legit... I guess you shelter yourself outside of coming to your own conclusions by research?

 

[03Sssnake]

because that would mean he had ethics.

on another note the bigger questions is why did he even bother to post this crap, and then claim he "doesn't want it to go off the deep end"? that is the most absurd comment I think I have seen on SVTP in quite some time. he has been here long enough to know that religious threads ALWAYS turn into a cluster **** and ALWAYS go off the deep end.

and on yet antoher note .. who gives a shit anyway TL;DR

:beer: Exactly...that is like to telling your wife... I don't WANT you to go crazy, but I ****ed your sister.

edit: Thanks for the heads up wurd

 

[FijiStudios]

Nice ninja edit Fiji.

U.M.

Did I ever claim anything that would lead you to believe that this was not just copy and posted or did you think I typed out a few 1000 words in 3 min? Lets not jump the conclusion here buddy. That edit was done before you even posted your second time and before had even posted the 3rd topic... Lets relax

 

[wurd2]

TL;DR

Que es esto?

:??:

.

 

[wurd2]

...that is like to telling your wife...I don't [want] you to go crazy, but I ****ed your sister.

:lol:

.

 

[FijiStudios]

because that would mean he had ethics.

on another note the bigger questions is why did he even bother to post this crap, and then claim he "doesn't want it to go off the deep end"? that is the most absurd comment I think I have seen on SVTP in quite some time. he has been here long enough to know that religious threads ALWAYS turn into a cluster **** and ALWAYS go off the deep end.

and on yet antoher note .. who gives a shit anyway TL;DR

of all the people to lecture me on starting shit?? :lol1: ok RDJ, happy to see you are here just to whine your ass off and then not even read the topic.

I included what it is about. If you are too ADD to read it then that's cool, go back to saying repost to every post.

And what a surprise, you are still lurking on this thread. You thrive on this stuff don't you?

 

[FijiStudios]

worth quoting for those that can not hold the attention span to read


As the “fountains of the deep” (Genesis 7:11) contain only 1% of the necessary water, 99% would have to fall from the supposed sky ocean. Thus, the goal of covering every mountain with only forty days’ worth of precipitation would require a rainfall of six inches per minute, which is far too tremendous for the primitive ark to remain intact. In great contrast, we would typically expect a rainfall of only six inches per hour from a category five hurricane. One can only decide that this requirement is hardly feasible to carry out, especially when the heat generated by the impact of the raindrops on the flood surface would have been more than sufficient to boil the water and prevent it from rising.

 

[Uncle Meat]

Did I ever claim anything that would lead you to believe that this was not just copy and posted or did you think I typed out a few 1000 words in 3 min? Lets not jump the conclusion here buddy. That edit was done before you even posted your second time and before had even posted the 3rd topic... Lets relax

Look at the time you edited your post and then look at what time I called your ass on it. 'Nuff said.

U.M.