Sam: Of course, that raises the question: if god could halt the digestive progress for a few months, why bother with the ark at all? Why not just give the animals gills until the waters receded?
Mahaloth: On the gripping hand: maybe humans aren’t as original as we like to think. C’mon, how inventive do you have to be to look out on a rainy day and think “What if it NEVER stops raining?”
As I just finished a course on this, the Epic of Gilgamesh has almost the exact same story.
A man gets told by one of the gods to build a boat and bring animals on it 'cause a huge-ass flood is coming, he does, it rains for a while, he sends out a dove, a raven and a swallow to see if there’s dry land yet.
Hmm… I wonder where the writers of the bible got their idea…
I’m not sure, but I think they were pretty stoned when they wrote most of it. I mean, the story of Job couldn’t possibly have come from a sober mind.
We, the Knights Who Say NI!, demand a second shrubbery next to the first, with a split level effect and a little path down the middle.
As for the flood, there were those fortresses built on top of coral reefs to keep out the guys with the tanker, and then there was the Mariner who had gills… Oh wait, that was Waterworld, nevermind.
Sturm, you will never, ever, EVER mention THAT MOVIE on the Straight Dope Message Boards again. If you do so, you will be punished by catapult.
(:D)
Koalas aren’t bears.
To follow up on DDG’s post, there is an excellent book that explains these theories in great detail called Noah’s Flood, by William Ryan and Watler Pitman. It puts forth several very convincing arguments for both an earlier Mediterranean cataclysm, and a later Black Sea one as well.
I remember a cartoon years ago. The Ark has hit dry land, and the animals walk off. Two lions, two elephants, two dogs, two wolves, seventy three rabbits …
Seriously, there are many ancient Flood stories around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. The Hebrews had their Noah story. Down Mesopotamia way, they had the Gilgamesh epic. Over in Ancient Greece, they had the story of Deucalion. And so on.
In all the ancient stories a nice guy gets a warning from one of his gods or from his one god, or from god knows where. He survives the Flood on a boat when everyone else dies. He becomes father of humanity etc.
The Ancient Greek story solves the obvious incest problem - Deucalion throws stones on the ground and they turn into people. I think Noah has very serious questions to answer in this area.
It’s clear that there was a major Flood, and a lot of guys got in boats with livestock. A few like Noah had good PR machines working for them, so they are remembered today. The rest just got on with life.
See this for a simple explanation - http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html
Wow. So even after Moses led the Exodus, he had the time to actually build an ark?
::: ducks and covers :::
The incest problem goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. But then, Eve was made out of Adam’s rib so maybe he was just masturbating.
I thought of mentioning Adam and his relationship with his cloned daughter Eve, but you expressed the point even better than I could have.
I have always been curious about this biblical support for incest. I tried to do bible studies with my sister, but she never came. 
Of course, if Eve was a clone of Adam, she would have been male… 
Zev Steinhardt
So . . .
Not only incest but with his son? But this guy Eve must have been a hermaphrodite, if we are to believe the Cain and Abel story. Or did they adopt? But then who were the natural first mother and father? 
Help! My logic is vanishing up its own fundament. :eek:
No - according to the good Book of Palindromes, the first words he said to Eve were “Madam, I’m Adam”. She was clearly female, when he let her have his bone . . .
Sinner! You are all sinners! Vile filth of Babylon! You will all burn! Or wait, was that drown? Both! You will drown in burning pitch! You will be forced to watch SPOOFE’s favorite movie for eternity! Unless you liked it, in which case you will be punished by catapult…? Uh, could you clarify that? Does the punished get fired upon? Used as a projectile? Used as the winding mechanism? Crushed under the wheel?
[sub]What exactly were you doing with your sister anyway? Just remember what Chef said to Stan. [/sub]
::: Innocent smile :::
I can’t think what you mean by this. . . Naturally I meant she never came to bible studies with me.
::: Hides filthy leer behind hand :::
I can answer how some Christians deal with this (and the “Who did Cain and Abel marry” question.)
Per the Bible Answer Man’s radio show (I can’t find this on his site, but I’ve heard him say it on his radio show numerous times), incest was no big deal before the “climate change” caused by the removal of the “water canopy” during the flood.
See, we were all “genetically perfect” before the flood, and since there were no bad recessive genes, it was no big deal for Cain to go East of Eden and find a long-lost sister to boink (Adam and Eve apparently had LOTS of kids), or for Noah’s kids to boink each other, even though they don’t have a viable population for genetic diversity.
His ‘proof’ of this is that until the flood, people lived 800+ years, soon after the flood, our lifespans dropped considerably. He claimed that the increased radiation (given the thickness that the water canopy would’ve had, the extra radiation is that strange phenomenon that we now call sunlight), added to the <weight?> of sin caused by eating the forbidden fruit allowed negative recessive genes to crop up, thus leading to the prohibition against incest.
Apparently the only reason not to commit inscest is genetics. Unequal power, the potential for abuse, etc have nothing to do with it.
I’ve heard him say this on the show on numerous occasions.
Fenris
Wow. Fenris, is this genuine?
Folks outside USA don’t do creationism, but it sounds like real fun. Can anyone play, and are there rules?
It’s a pity my sister and I missed out on our bible studies all those years ago. You know what they say - “The family that plays together stays together.”
Yup, he’s even got an internet radio broadcast if you follow the link in my earlier post. Given how often he repeats his topics, you’ve got about a 1 in 20 chance of hearing him talk about the “close-minded idiots” who believe in “the farce of evolution”. If he’s on that topic you’ve got about a 25% chance that he’ll get into the whole “genetically perfect so incest was OK back then” thing.
But this guy is nothing compared to the now-marginalized [http://www.boblarson.org/Newsletter/newsletter.html]Bob Larson, who started the whole “Satanic Ritual Abuse” mania in the late 80’s and who used to exorcize demons over the radio (about twice a week). The best bit was that he’d inevitably put the Prince Of Darkness on hold while he did commericals for his show. And the partly exorcized Prince Of Darkness would just hang around until Larson came back. (Some of Bob’s better moments can be found here
I’ve travelled all over multiple continents, but NOBODY has radio-weirdos like the USA.
Fenris (just to be clear: I don’t believe this stuff, and these loonies don’t represent the bulk of Christians, even US Christians. But I find 'em fascinating.)
It’s been a long time since I read this book but…
In Woolie’s book about Ur that he found in the early 60s he found what he thinks was a major flood. He got to the bottom of his digging and kept digging more. I think he got through 20 some feet of silt and started finding more stuff. He reasoning was that there was a major flood and then people come back to the same place.
It wouldn’t suprise me if there was a number of major floods that killed off loads of people and stories came from this.
Fenris, rah rah!
Good old battlin Bob Larson was truly entertaining.
I even saw him “perform” live many years ago here in Ohio.
No demons showed up that day to be exorcised though.