Many religious people support the Noah story/fable. Last October, 2009 and last week, April 2010, two teams of scientists on the science channel and discovery channel said “No way.” Blue whales eat krill because it’s tiny, also some other small sea creatures. Their throats cannot swallow people. They also said there were no fish large enough to swallow a man at that time, megafishes had died off. I follow the science channel and discovery channel and wanted to know if I had supporters. I don’t believe every story in the Bible and if I think otherwise my church friends think I’m a heretic. Also, I don’t believe Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt. It’s just a story to teach us not to look back after God has released us from a place of sin. My church insist she literally turned into a pillar of salt. Maybe it’s too much for me to believe or being a thinking person, I simply don’t believe it. Even if Lot had gotten down a whale’s throat, the digestive juices would have killed him. Or is that the miracle?
Wasn’t it Jonah and the whale?
Look, the Bible explicitly describes the story of Jonah and the whale as a miracle. If you accept that, fine - just don’t try to apply science to it.
Personally, I just think it’s a good story. Whether it actually happened is irrelevant.
Jonah and not, in fact, a whale. I’m happy to go along with “tall story with a point to it”, but if we’re talking about miracles, we should bear in mind that they tend to involve something, well, miraculous. As long as God is helpfully sending along a great sea creature to swallow you whole, He might as well arrange that you won’t suffocate or be digested. 
I doubt the ancient Israelites understood the concept of marine mammals. “Fish”, to them, probably meant anything vaguely fish-like.
I always thought so. A related Straight Dope column: Have any real-life Jonahs been swallowed by whales and lived?
As for the Jonah story, there’s no reason to buy it. It couldn’t have been done by a blue whale, since as the OP says their throats are too narrow. As for something like a sperm whale, naturally you’d be digested; and probably suffocated or chewed up beforehand. I suppose that it’s conceivable that someone might be swallowed and somehow be removed, but it would have to be very fast; being inside something built to digest you isn’t healthy.
Has anyone survived being swallowed whole by a Great White shark? If they did, I doubt they were inside long enough to travel to Nineveh.
Digestive juices? How 'bout oxygen, people?
By the way…
Fuck those guys.
Actually, this myth has a slight basis, namely a rock formation that vaguely resembles a person, though I’m not sure how commonplace it is for American biblical literalists to be aware that such a formation actually exists.
It’s like that story - The Prince and The Porpoise.
If that’s a pillar of halite in the photo, surely it wouldn’t have looked exactly like that for thousands of years?
I’m amazed that nobody has actually pointed out the most obvious fact, which is that Jonah, while residing in ancient Israel supposedly took the sea route to Nineveh, which is in northern Iraq, far inland. So this whalesharkfish apparently went all the way around the horn of Africa, into the Persian Gulf and then swam up the Tigris?
There is only one possible answer: Sandworm.
Mark Twain retold that as the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dolphin, right? 
More seriously, I have a great deal of problems with any group who insists that (a) it was really God who wrote something that explicitly identifies itself as a collection of works written by a number of men over the course of several hundred years, (b) insists that any narrative must be literal objective historical narrative (invented in about 1830), and © considers one a nonbeliever for seeing the contnts as story (which dates back to, well, Biblical days).
And who cannot even read the stories for the points they are obviously making, but takes some extraneous detail and founds a highly improbable doctrine, one which usually contravenes the findings of science, on it.
It’s crap like that that’s given the term “Christian” a bad name.
In the late 1800’s, a British scholar Ferrar Fenton did a rather eccentric Bible translation. He stated that “The Great Fish” was actually a ship that picked him up as a castaway.
I have no idea if he’s basing this on some ancient lore or a detail in the Hebrew.
As for Lot’s wife, I’ve heard in conservative churches for years that she didn’t just “look”- she lingered to gaze upon the destruction of her city & was engulfed by the falling rock salt, or the fire burned her to a pile of ashes. On the other hand, George Lamsa in his translation of the Aramaic Bible, said that “turned into a pillar of salt” was a figure of speech for being frozen in horror & heart failure.
To the OP, please get your Bible characters straight.
What I want to know is how the whale got two of every animal in its stomach.
Well, Gepetto survived long enough in the belly of a whale, before Pinocchio came to rescue him. So, why wouldn’t Jonas be able to?
I mean, he had a chair and lighting, enough fish to eat… didn’t he even have some books in there?
What do you mean, “it’s just a fairytale.” ?
I thought Joseph rode on the whale to Bethlehem, because there was a census.
You have to look at the pillar of salt in terms of the New Testament:
Lot’s wife looked back, as in compassion and has become a pillar of God and salt of the earth.
God doesn’t turn people into such objects as ‘punishment’, if you look, those things are not strange, but opening up the earth and swallowing them, calling down fire from heaven.
We are allowed to do anything in Love, and God wants that, not blind obedience. King David violated the law and was found blameless. God wants a righteous heart. Blind obedience will get us there, as Abraham was about to kill his son, but not what God wants.
Yes it was real, and Jonah died:
IMHO the fish is real, but we might consider it spiritual, it’s being swallowed up in death. It isn’t a known species, thought there may have been a physical fish counterpart, such as a shark, that ate his physical body. In Job 41 God speaks of a leviathan, some sea going animal that does not seem to have a physical counterpart.
The story was written long before the modern taxonomical system, so I think there’s a great deal of truth to what you said.
Besides, if one is going to postulate a miracle, one can just as well postulate that God created a unique creature for that specific purpose.