Regarding the flood…
Somewhere in the story (I think…) it doesn’t just say the waters came from the sky, but from the ground as well. Putting this in the equation there are a lot of people who say that the flood was what broke Pangea up and created the world as we know it. It rained and all too, but the water coming from the ground is what made a majority of the flood waters.
Isn’t that a strong argument that it SHOULD be negated ? If teaching kids good judgement makes them less likely to be religious, that’s an argument against the worth of religion, not an argument against good judgement.
Since Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet high, and Ararat is 15,000, it would mean no vegatation would grow if there was that much water covering the whole earth, and olive trees do not grow on mountians. If the Ark rested on Ararat it would mean it was settled at least at 15,000 feet or close to it. Then of course there is the problem of how all the animals managed to eat for nearly a year, then swam back to Africa, the Americas etc… . It may be a good idea to not try to explain the story, just read it and let them figure it out on their own as they will as they get older. Like the Santa Clause flying through the air with Reindeer.
Teaching children to interpret the Old Testament reminds me of this lesson from “The Meaning of Life”
And spotteth twice they the camels before the third hour.
And so the Midianites went forth to Ram Gilead in Kadesh Bilgemath by Shor Ethra Regalion,
to the house of Gash-Bil-Betheul-Bazda, he who brought the butter dish to Balshazar and
the tent peg to the house of Rashomon,
and there slew they the goats, yea, and placed they the bits in little pots.
Here endeth the lesson.
:eek: It all makes sense now!
*“The Babel fish,” said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
"But,' says Man, The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
"Oh dear,' says God, I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
"`Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.*[right]-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy[/right]
Amusingly, this comes off sounding like a bunch of Trekkies arguing whether the animated series is part of the official canon or not. I guess that makes Lot’s wife a redshirt.
I think Pinky and the Brain does a good job of demonstrating a lot of moral principles such as the fallibility of hubris and the need to protect the indigent.
Oh, and because (surprisingly) no one has yet mentioned it, the o.p. should review Martin Catilian’s All True Bible Stories For Children, a (“very, very literal”) telling of stories from the Old Testament.
Stranger
Your’s had a picture of John the Baptist’s head on the plate? Damn, all my Children’s Bible had was a picture of Salome dancing. (Although her dress was really pretty)
:mad:
Theology IS fanwank.
See? Back to Bill Cosby again.
“Let it rain for 40 days and 40 nights and wait for the sewers to back up.”
“RI-I-I-IGHT!”
Stranger regarding your whole “Hitchiker’s” thing…
That whole thing in and of itself is wrong from the get-go “Without faith I am nothing” is wrong.
Hell the whole thing is closer to PROVING God exists!!
IMO Faith is probably about 40% of the Bible. It’s 100% of your (from a Christians perspective) salvation, but really only about 40 of the Bible. You need faith to basically believe in the extraordinary parts of the Bible (the miracles, flood, creation, etc.) but the history of the Bible is very much intact, and the things mentioned in the Biblical timeline are very much true. Without faith you aren’t a “saved christian”. You need faith to believe that Jesus died and rose again for your sins, and through him you are forgiven. That is basically the key to salvation; different denominations will see this differently, but I was raised Lutheran, so this is my perspective.
God does probably refuse to prove he exists because it would take out the need for faith (and free will too mostly), but he is still there without faith. If this babel fish that is in the story is Man’s way of saying “You exist, God”, then God’s response probably would be “You’re right. That is proof I exist. Nothing this spectacular could have happened by chance. This is how I show Man that I am here, that I exist, and the things that I have said are true”.
(Ya know, reading this thread as a whole…I seem to be the only one defending the faith here, can’t I get SOME backup? :p)
Well, sure. That’s explicitly recognized as an intermediate step in the argument. 
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Seriously, the Bible can have some cool stories. Really bloody and violent. (And I remember in our first grade class, my friends and I always used to spend recess giggling at the naked pictures of Adam and Eve - even though you couldn’t see any naughty bits)
Actually, no, it’s not historically all that accurate even when it comes to the non-fantastic parts.
In reality a lot of the Bible stories are provern untrue. Indeed there was a flood, but it did not destroy the whole world, The Pharoh did not drown in the Red Sea,but lived to an old age. And if you read Matthew Chapter 16 you will see that Jesus promised to the people He was talking to, that he would come back in all His glory with his angels while some of them standing there were still alive, He did not come back then, nor are there any 2,000+ old people still on earth.
Faith is not a bad thing, but the truth is even better!
Not that it’s the best way to argue such things but, yes…yes it is.
Nope, it’s full of factual inaccuracies that have nothing to do with the outright fantastic elements. There was no Davidian Empire and no Exodus, for example.
And the downside of this is?
I enjoyed the esthetics of religion. I liked singing in Hebrew, and I liked the sound of the shofar, and the garb the Cantor wore on Yom Kippur, and even being in temple all day. It just isn’t true.
Maybe in the reboot some nasty alien will turn a red shirt into a pillar of salt.
Try reading The Bible Unearthed.
(I hope the ability to put in Amazon links to make the Dope money comes in soon.)
The downside is the fact that you say all of that, and end it with “It just isn’t true”. It causes people (again, not necessarily the ones here) to just be absolutely adamant that everything is made up or whatever, and they never believe. And they raise their families adamant that they never believe. When having conversations with non-believers they are very quick to say “Can’t you just accept that you can be wrong??”, but they themselves are never willing to accept that THEY can be wrong.