Noah's Ark

[Enola_Straight]

What? Nobody else in the world had a boat?

[CalMeacham]

Sssssh!

You start asking that and people are going to start asking about the fish. And the whales. And the amphibians. And what about the 17-year locusts? What if it’s not the right year?

[Ethilrist]

Nobody else had a boat, tons and tons of food, and the idea to get ON the boat when it started raining, except for that whack job, Noah, the guy who listened to burning bushes.

[Munch]

Moses was the one listening to the burning shrubbery.

[Wrath]

It was a nice shrubbery. I liked the laurels particularly.

So, tell me again, how many of each kind of animal did Moses take aboard the Ark?

[andros]

Nah, Moses was the one who killed Goliath.

[Ukulele_Ike]

What’s a cubit?

[andros]

Right.

[Liberal]

Oh, you silly atheists. You need only go to the Prophet of YAHWEH for your answers, available in hand zip format.

[sqweels]

[quote]
What’s a cubit?

[quote]

A naked baby with wings and a bow-n-arrow rendered in abstract art.

[Wrath]

Now that’s just plain stubit.

[Freyr]

**enolancooper wrote:

What? Nobody else in the world had a boat?**

The better question to ask would be: What?! No one else used this bit of mythology?

The answer is yes

The Greeks used it, as did the Norse and Sumarians, too. In fact, all around Europe, you can find bits of this mythological story in old folk tales. Just go looking.

[Ukulele_Ike]

*Originally posted by Freyr *
all around Europe, you can find bits of this mythological story in old folk tales.

Hey, before JillGat comes storming in here with her pole-ax…this would be a GREAT thread for me to do my Velikovsky routine in!

{stands up on a chair, clears throat}

Damn! Too late!

[Mahaloth]

*Originally posted by Freyr *
****enolancooper wrote:

What? Nobody else in the world had a boat?**

The better question to ask would be: What?! No one else used this bit of mythology?

The answer is yes

The Greeks used it, as did the Norse and Sumarians, too. In fact, all around Europe, you can find bits of this mythological story in old folk tales. Just go looking. **

Either that or every culture has it’s own metaphysical explanation of a real event.

[Ukulele_Ike]

*Originally posted by Mahaloth *
every culture has it’s own metaphysical explanation of a real event.

Yes! YES!

As the great thinker and visionary Immanuel Velikovsky says…{cough.}

{cough.}

{cough. cough. cough. cough.}

{dissolves in a coughing fit}

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

*Originally posted by Mahaloth *
**

*Originally posted by Freyr *
****enolancooper wrote:

What? Nobody else in the world had a boat?**

The better question to ask would be: What?! No one else used this bit of mythology?

The answer is yes

The Greeks used it, as did the Norse and Sumarians, too. In fact, all around Europe, you can find bits of this mythological story in old folk tales. Just go looking. **

Either that or every culture has it’s own metaphysical explanation of a real event. **

http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/09/15/p2s1.htm

The notion that the Black Sea flood could have triggered diaspora was first posited by two marine geologists at the Lamont-Dorherty Geophysical Observatory at Columbia University in New York. Based on their research in the region, William Ryan and Walter Pitman III concluded that as glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age, water from a rising Mediterranean Sea breached a natural dam at the Bosporus, plunging at least 300 feet into the Black Sea basin. For up to a year, water thundered into the area, engulfing a vast fresh-water lake and some 60,000 square miles of land.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Dang. :mad: Left a chunk out.

Black Sea find may explain Noah’s flood

A team of researchers announced this week that they have found what appear to be stone tools, mud-and-wattle walls, and potsherds lying in 300 feet of water off northern Turkey. The discovery, the team says, indicates that humans lived along the shores of an ancient lake that was suddenly to become the Black Sea when vast continental glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age and sent a cataclysmic flood surging into the basin.

The event, which occurred some 7,500 years ago, would have been so traumatic that it may be the origin of flood stories, such as Noah and his ark in the Bible, that appear in the religious writings of early civilizations ranging from Sumerians and Babylonians to the Hebrews, Greeks, and Egyptians.

[Max_Torque]

To answer Wrath: the Bible is itself unclear. For most animals, two of each animal. However, an instruction is given in Genesis 7 to take seven of each clean animal; problem is, the Bible I’m looking at isn’t sure if that means “seven” or “seven pairs”. The seven/seven pairs applies to birds, as well as “clean” animals.

Of course, with that many animals, space gets to be a premium. Allow me to quote myself, in a message I posted to a BBS years ago:

The ark was, according to the Bible, 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits. The volume of the ark, then, allowing for error on the side of creationists, is about 56250 cubic meters, if it is considered rectangular rather than boat-shaped. There are approximately 1.12 million known animal land species (plants could be taken as seeds). Divided among them, this makes about 0.05 cubic meters of space for each pair of a species. Plenty for ants, but hardly enough for elephants, or even squirrels for that matter. Since many of the known animal species are insects, it is conceivable to cram all these animals into the space, but that’s allowing for no spare room whatsoever.

Now, let’s talk food. An African elephant eats about 160 kg per day, for a total of 96 metric tons for the duration of the voyage. This would take up a remarkable amount of space, since the average bale weighs about 32kg. Having taken care of that single elephant, let’s talk about the other elephants, and the zebras, and horses, and camels, and hippos, and so forth. Additionally, God ordered Noah to take not two, but seven of each type of ruminant animal. Plus, we haven’t yet considered carnivores such as the lion, which consumes its own weight in food every 9 days or so.

And, you know…we haven’t even mentioned fresh water yet. Not to mention that Noah had to take seven of each of over 8000 distinct species of bird. Or that animals like koala bears require fresh eucalyptus leaves every day, so the trees would have to be growing on board. Or that if the earth were covered with fresh water, many salt water species would die, so Noah would have to build tanks for them…

Creationists usually respond with the “kinds” argument. Oh please, Bible-types, tell us about “kinds”!

[Sam_Stone]

Well, for instance, since creationists believe that God exists and created the flood, it’s not much of stretch to suppose that he made food magically appear in the animal’s stomachs, or simply that he decided that the whole boring digestive process should be halted for a few months.

Just as religious people are silly for trying to ‘prove’ the bible with science, we’re silly for trying to disprove religion in the same way. Once you invoke God, all bets are off. Perhaps the Ark was a big tesseract. Maybe God made one of those funky boats that was only 300 cubits long on the outside, but 3000 cubits long on the inside.

[jharding]

In reference to other flood stories told in other cultures as suggested by Freyr…

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html