Maybe this is something like how I’ll tell the flood story.
I almost don’t want to tell you what happened. But this is how the story goes. Listen; alot of the stories that are coming show God doing some pretty great stuff. But this time, he does something very terrible.
What happens next is, God kills everyone.
Everyone but Noah’s family. Everyone else in the entire world—gone. God did it over the course of 40 days, and the way he did it was, he drowned them. That’s what the story says. God drowned everyone in the world by making a huge flood cover the entire world with water. The box he had Noah build, the “Ark”, turns out, it was some kind of giant boat. Noah and his family and all the animals stayed in the boat, and they were all safe.
Imagine the smell. Imagine the heat. It was probably very uncomfortable. And outside, all those people dying. Maybe some of them begged to be let into the box.
Horrible.
After 40 days, the flood was over. It stopped raining. Noah took one of the birds he’d kept in the Ark and sent it out to see what it could find. It came back with a twig from an olive tree, which let Noah know that there was now dry land outside. So he opened up the door on the Ark, and his family and all the animals left.
Now do you see why all the animals were in the Ark with Noah’s family? God didn’t just kill every person on the planet. He also killed all the animals.
In the story the way it usually gets told, Noah now made an altar and started worshipping God. He probably did feel pretty happy that God had saved him and his family, and that he’d saved enough of the animals to repopulate the planet. It is hard for me to imagine, though, that Noah was completely satisfied with what had just happened.
I mean, everyone, and everything, was dead. God had killed them all.
Personally, I’d be angry. And sad. Even at the same time that I was feeling grateful.
So I think maybe at this point, (and this is the story the way I tell it, not the way it’s usually told,) Noah maybe yelled at God a little bit. Or if he didn’t outright yell at God, still, he probably cried--probably alot--about the terrible things that had just happened. In fact, the way I imagine it, “yelling” and “crying” are barely adequate words for what I imagine it was like for Noah at this point.
If I’m right about that, it might help explain what happens next. Because as the story goes, God made Noah a promise next. God promised to never cause a flood like that again. I get tripped up on this. In these stories, God is supposed to be supremely wise. But if he’s supremely wise, you might think he can’t make a mistake. And if he can’t make a mistake and he’s supremely wise, he can’t regret something he’s done. But if he promises never to make a flood like that again, it sure sounds like he regrets the flood. It almost sounds like he’s sorry.
That’s why I think Noah was angry. God sees Noah’s anger, and realizes something. He realizes that he has done something bad. God realized he had done something he shouldn’t have done, and he promised never to do it again.
So then am I saying God isn’t supremely wise? In the stories, he is supposed to be. In the story I’ve told, maybe he isn’t. But what does “wise” mean? What is “supreme” wisdom? Does it mean you can never mistakes? Even very large ones? Does it mean that you can’t learn?
Not if wisdom involves knowing how and when to regret one’s mistakes. Even the big tragic ones.
Shalom Auslander? Are you a Doper now? Seriously, though, I think you’d love Foreskin’s Lament. It’s about a man who believes in god and it’s been a real problem for him.
Old Testament God. Can’t live with him, can’t flush him down the toilet like the ghosts I find around the house.
I think, starting at about here, you are putting too much of your own thoughts into the equation and thus leaving out the doctrine of it all.
I don’t think God regretted the flood at all. The world had gotten to a point of no return, something had to be done in order to restore order. It was easy to save Noah and crew because they were the only good ones left, the animals too (since it wasn’t really their fault. The animals that didn’t make it, dinos and such, weren’t chosen…I don’t know why).
The promise God made to Noah simply was “There will no longer be a point of no return”. It is to future generations saying that they can still be saved with repentance and subsequent forgiveness, they don’t have to live in fear of dying.
To throw in my own conjecture too. God has made it plenty clear that he’s not for loneliness. (He created the animals and Eve specifically to fight Adam’s loneliness) So I hold to the fact that God just created more people, ala Adam, in order to keep Noah’s family from perpetual loneliness.
(last but not least. Are you teaching the Bible for them to figure out? Or are you gonna teach it with an air of “it’s true” or “it’s not true”
If he’s really omnipotent, why didn’t he just get rid of the bad eggs and the nephilim without a flood that would have to kill everything, including animals, who are presumably neutral?
Because that would conflict with the overall concept of faith. If God can make everything perfect from the get-go, then we wouldn’t need to have faith in him and his good works.
Then why does he bother to fix anything at all? Why not just live with the fact that some people suck and there are some nephilim around, and that’s life? This way seems to smell of “The ends justify the means.”
First thing, read it directly from the Bible. All the picture books show a nice clear Earth, and never go into the drowning baby bit. Kind of like Dr. Strangelove recommended everyone go into the mineshafts before the people left behind started to die.
What I did, when my kids were of reasoning age, was to start with Genesis and helped them see the contradictions and multiple story versions, and kept going until they started picking up on them themselves. Didn’t take long, I have smart kids. That did the job.
Try reading Exodus. In there, God very clearly doesn’t go for faith, but provides plenty of evidence of his existence and his powers. The current concept of faith is just a rather feeble explanation of why there is no evidence of any God or gods in our world.
Tsk tsk. Imagine someone thinking about this stuff and not believing blindly. How horrid.
The animals not on the ark must have felt great about that. Ditto the innocent babies drowned.
The God in the story is a monster, no doubt about it. I’ve always figured that if there was a real God, the first question he’d ask in heaven would be if you believed in the Flood story. If you said yes, he’d say “What kind of schmuck do you think I am, killing billions. You go to hell.” We atheists who use our god-given brains would get a pass right into the place. And no flippin’ harps too.
Question: If the entire planet was covered in water for 40 days, where did the olive branch come from? Did they have a biblical equivalent to Miracle-Gro or something?
I hear what you’re saying but…Believing it blindly because it was taught to you by a pastor or parent is the same as NOT believing it blindly because it was taught to you by a friend/parent.
Also: The olive branch was found because the waters didn’t recede instantly. The branch came from an area of the world that wasn’t underwater.
Also x2: There is no point in the Bible in which God says “I never do anything bad whatsoever”. God does have a vengeful side to those who oppose him. Cities are smited, people turn to salt, people die. Christians are NOT taught to tell everyone “God never does anything wrathful to his enemies”, if a Christian tells you they were, they were taught wrong.
Final Also: I don’t mind that this is a MPSIMS, but a move to Great Debates wouldn’t surprise me
Well, was Zeus a monster when he created a flood that drowned everyone except Deucalion and his wife?
Presenting this story as “the omnipotent creator of the universe did this” misses the meat of the story. Ancient people told stories of capricious and contradictory supernatural beings because that’s the way the world was. People get leprosy, locusts eat everything, firstborn sons die, and why? Because that’s just the way the gods are. They invented the gods to explain the world, and since the world wasn’t perfection the gods weren’t perfect either. Including Yahweh.
It makes no sense to be angry at the god in the story that causes the flood, because that god isn’t the modern conception of God, although our modern conception of God grew from those 3000 year old stories.
When I read Greek mythology to my kids, I don’t make a big point about how unfair Zeus is when he impregnates some maiden and turns her into a heifer and suchlike. They don’t expect Zeus to be fair. And when you tell the story of Noah and his wife Joan, you don’t have to make a big point about how unfair Yahweh is.
Absolutely. I tried to teach my kids how to think, not what to think. Then I had to watch out not to say anything logically incorrect. Seems to have worked, considering their academic success.
Hold the phone. What parts weren’t underwater? Though, a common theme in flood myths are the last survivors meeting a bunch of other people from over the hill.
A lot of Christians seem to believe in an omnibenevolent god. If you don’t, you’ve got a much easier time of it justifying our world.
Yeah, one of the many problems is trying to shoehorn the modern conception of God as a sweety into the old one you pointed out. I don’t recall the Greeks and Romans ever pretending that their gods were nice guys. One Roman comedy I read concerned a general returning home (it was set in Greece) to find that Zeus had taken his form and was busy shtupping his wife. Try to put the equivalent with our God or Jesus on Broadway and see what happens.
The fact that God’s nature follows the election returns, as it were, is a great argument for atheism.
I guess I don’t mind the Greek ones because it’s not like anyone pretended otherwise. They’re these capricious, almost child-like types. It’s like putting a bunch of spoiled rich teenagers in charge of the world and expecting them to be good and pious. No way. But since Christians are always going on about what a great, loving guy God is, it pisses me off when I see evidence to the contrary.
Only small part is that if you keep telling them “do it logically”, it negates the concept of faith, which in turn is a roundabout way of guaranteeing them not believing.
The “what parts weren’t underwater” are the tops of mountains and stuff that broke the surface once the waters receded…it wasn’t a coincidence they landed on a mountain.
The unfortunate part about most modern debates on topics such as this is that, to my experience, modern Christians seem to not believe this themselves. Which REALLY gives us a bad name, and makes conversations like this one a whole helluva lot more aggressive and agitating. Between “God doesn’t do anything bad ever” and "You’re going to hell you know that!!! (But what about this?) Nope, going to hell (what about this?) NO! YOU! HELL!
I’m with Lemur866. We read our son (now 13) Bible stories, as well as Greek and Roman and Norse stories, and we emphasized the idea of what a myth is: a story that tries to make sense of things we don’t understand – not only natural phenomena, but things like why bad stuff happens to good people.
The difference is, few people are trying to say that Zeus was fair; plenty of people try to say that God is. If Frylock refrains from pointing out the unfairness, that won’t stop the kids from being exposed to the rationalizations for why it WAS fair.
Seems to have worked, considering their academic success.