Even though I’m Christian, I do not believe that the Noah’s Ark story was a worldwide flood. It would be geologically impossible, among other things.
In the meantime, Ken Ham, a longtime apologetic who has debated a number of atheists and skeptics in public fora, has somehow come up with $100 million to build a life-sized replica of Noah’s Ark, according to Biblical proportions, and stocked it with animatronic replicas of people and animals.
He also anticipates 1 million visitors a year (at $40 per person :smack: )
Yeah, yeah, I know everyone laughed at Noah too. But that isn’t the same thing.
I kind of like this commentary from a man who was a fundamentalist Christian for a while and later converted to paganism. NSFW for language.
There are something like 40,000 different denominations of Protestantism alone. I’m not sure that you can actually choose your own God. But, you have to think that most of the possible combinations would’ve gotten covered by now.
I’d love to see a flow chart to help someone narrow down their choices a little. I love the thought that there might be a denomination out there somewhere that believes exactly what a given Christian believes, but they just never locate each other.
As an aside, there are a bunch of things in life that would seem to be really simple and straight-forward. But, which are actually staggeringly complicated. Religion, Love, Sex, Food. It’s an adventure.
Even the most literalist Christians I know are okay with the idea that it was a local flood that covered all of humanity (who had not gotten far–this was before the Tower of Babel) rather than literally covering the whole planet. It make sense–God was mad at humanity. And, even today, we have no problem saying “the end of the world” when we mean “the end of humanity.”
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Personally, I’m okay with the idea of a big local flood, that was big enough to be exaggerated to “the whole world.” There was no land in sight, and a significant number of people died (but not the “whole world”–too much of a bottleneck). There are too many flood myths for me to think a flood didn’t happen.
He tried to start this rubbish here in Tennessee, & our gullible politicians bought it, hook, line & sinker.
And then, a strange alliance formed–Fundamentalists, who thought a for-profit theme-park was heresy, and Church & State Separatists, who opposed spending Government money to fund religious groups.
They fought hard, & won.
But it was close.
Tennessee’s Political Class are indeed Rubes & Gomers, every one.
Maybe there’s a market for a Christian ark attraction based theme park. Largest timber framed structure in the world? The animatronics look cool. Not everyone who comes to see it has to share his Biblical literalist creationist belief system … or even be Christian. They just have share the belief that looking at that thang is worth forty bucks a pop. Seems not worth it to me but some people drive out of their way just to see the world’s largest ball of string so who knows? He has visitors to his Creationist museum forty miles away and predicts the first forty days will bring in 1.4 million visitors.* (After which he’ll open up a window and send out a raven …)
Is it state sponsorship of religious or First amendment rights? The court says the latter.
*Attendance at his Creation museum has apparently been slumping. Experts think the Ark won’t attract quite so many as its developer claims - more like “640,000 visitors in its best year” but still enough “that it would have a financial benefit to the state and meet the economic qualifications to earn state incentives.”
Of course local floods have happened. Was there one large flood that inspired all the various flood myths, or did one culture’s flood myth inspire other cultures’ flood myths, or did various cultures all create flood myths independently in response to local historic floods with local damage? Based on the many similarities other than the Flood alone with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, I’d bet on the second but without a conclusive historic record who knows?
I bet the farther back in time you go, the more people took more parts of the bible literally. As science and technology render different parts of the stories not possible they get rellegated to parables or teaching stories or some version of the original that could be true. If all of the bible isn’t true, why should one believe any of it is true?
