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My kid asked me two days ago
"Daddy, what's the big deal with Noah's ark?"
I replied, " it's just a cultural myth, an ancient campfire tale"
"Yeah Dad I know that already, I mean I know it's not real, but why do people talk about it?"
THEREIN is the true curiosity of a budding intellect. Some one who rather than waste time saying "OH yeah the Bible says it so yeah it happened..huh huh huh" but someone who would say "WHy does this socio-cultural myth fascinate so many people?"
For me, amongst other things, it makes a statement of contemporary gullibility and desperation. People want and maybe some feel that they need so BADLY to have a God that would round up someone to save the Earth so he can go about destroying it because he screwed up the first time.
How desperate someone must be to cling to some fables from another culture and to try to take and repackage it to apply towards their own. The rehashing of ancient myths, ancient stories told by those who did not know anything about science or life that we know now....Yes TAHT is the big deal with Noah's Ark.
My kid asked me two days ago
"Daddy, what's the big deal with Noah's ark?"
I replied, " it's just a cultural myth, an ancient campfire tale"
"Yeah Dad I know that already, I mean I know it's not real, but why do people talk about it?"
.
People talk about it because all of Christianity is ingrained in our culture. One need not be a subscriber to Christianity to employ any of the multitude of common reference points in our society. If you say someone is a "Judas" then everyone instantly knows you think that person is a traitor. If you compare a woman to Jezebel or Delilah, we know you are saying she is some sort of temptress with an agenda. That person has the "patience of Job", that particular pleasure over there might be the "forbidden fruit", when we state that we are "washing our hands" of something, we are referencing Pilate's actions. We might solve someone's priority problem by saying "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."
Our culture is chockablock with a few thousand years worth of common stories. Tell your kid that people talk about Noah's ark for the same reasons they talk about Robin Hood or King Arthur.
You seem willing to go on at length about this, a willingness I do not share. However, a couple of things...
Jesus certainly did go about telling people to abandon their jobs and families and follow him, you are the first person of any religious disposition I have encountered who denies this. Jesus is famous for having done this, it is discussed at excruciating length in numerous works of Biblical scholarship. I find it impossible to believe that you are unfamiliar with the famous passage in Luke..
Pretty dang unambiguous, so I am going to have to start from the position that you do not know your gospels nearly as well as you think. It is exactly as I have stated and you need to do some homework if you think otherwise. It is certainly something you should do when considering telling someone that he is "making it up." Well, did I make up that passage in Luke?
And despite your recognizing that I had taken no position with my initial question, sure enough, in your above response you have decided to position me as someone claiming that nothing in the teachings of Jesus is worthwhile. You wrote
If you disagree with it, you should try and find someone to argue with who does assert such a thing...I did not.
My position is that Jesus is a menu...take from him what you like, ignore what you do not find useful. There is no reason to treat Jesus any differently from any other philosopher, no reason to give his teachings any special notice. If someone wishes to ignore Jesus utterly, well, why not? That is no different than ignoring Plato or Kant.
Finally, no I am not any sort of champion of the sin/repentance cycle which Christianity promotes. I think that is largely an excuse for sustaining bad behavior via too easily obtained absolution. It reminds me of the classic alcoholic cycle..binge/dry out..over and over. The prodigal son's brother got screwed six ways to Sunday, he put in the work, he put in the years of devotion while his brother was a prime magnitude selfish fug up. The end of the story is the fug up getting the reward and the devoted brother getting a lecture from his pop. If I was the older brother I'd tell my father to take a hike and from now on he can try and get some work out of the joyfully returned screw up.
It is such a stupid story that I wonder if something went wrong in the translation. Based on how the rewards were distributed, it seems like an encouragement to bad behavior and a warning against being so foolish as to be responsible and devoted.
As you wish. Make no effort to study original language and context, and continue to rely upon your out of context English translation, same as those Christians who follow false ways. further, continue in your contemporary hatred of those things with which you disagree.
Sorry, I was mistaken in thinking you are willing to exchange ideas. You reveal yourself to be yet another ideologue.
As you wish. Make no effort to study original language and context, and continue to rely upon your out of context English translation, same as those Christians who follow false ways. further, continue in your contemporary hatred of those things with which you disagree.
Sorry, I was mistaken in thinking you are willing to exchange ideas. You reveal yourself to be yet another ideologue.
Best wishes
You got caught with the Luke quote, have no answer, so the above personal attack struck you as a good substitute?
Thanks Grandstander and Logline (I have to spread some more rep around but I will get back to u)
I think you are correct Grandstander, in that Christinaity has been so ingrained in our culture that it has become commmonplace. Wht still fascinates me, and my kid, is why there so many people believe tall tales, like Noah's Ark, which are scientifically impossible and things like the great flood which again are not scientifically possible but culturally tracable through mythology and culture. Do people still exist who do not have the intellegence to understand this? OR is it more the result of desperation, of people who WISH it were true, because if it were, it would validate their beliefs?
Certainly more interesting than listening to someone say "Oh yeah.....it's in the BuyBull so it has to be true MMMM HMmmm Pass me that there okra Erlene"
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The way it's done, again and again. Proving... NADA again and again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wretched.elect
It's funny that when arguing against creationism, and all of the things that go along with it, the only possible explanation, other than pure mental illness, is that it all happened by magic.
And yet that is exactly what the 'theory' of evolution wants everyone to accept, that it was 'magic' that caused the first 'accidental' organic creature to come about. Then, magically, fish began to breath air and moved to land. Then, magically, they grew legs and began walking on them. Then, magically, those legs became wings and birds suddenly came into being.
Then, that cow that grew out of the fish, with all of it's 'magical' evolutionary jumps, walked back into the water and became whales and dolphins! That's not even mentioning the 'magical' appearance of complex organs (liver, stomach, kidney, eye, lungs, brain, etc.) All of these 'magical' biological developments within the various creature are explained as some kind of intelligence that the evolutionary process has in order to able to make these evolutionary advances. And this has to be done over and over and over again hoping that each new genetic mutation doesn't actually kill the the new species. But hey, it's 'magic', it can happen.
Firstoff, I'll note the usual and purposeful mis-definition of "theory". Your refusal to accept the correct definition, choosing instead to continue with a proven-wrong definition as somehow denouncing a known set of established facts... But then, this is tired old straw-man argument on display. I wonder who you think it convinces? The already intransigent crowd you choose to hang with?
Actually, you hugely oversimplify, and then try to make a case against, the observed and documented mutations in an organism's DNA, RNA and other functional units of living biochemistry, that do, yessiree, occur in real life. Note that, in the lab now, using a mere few million organisms ( in a single petri dish..) to test an hypothesis, we have indeed seen the chance creation of the basic amino acid precursors of DNA. Then, we've also seen, now, the creation of RNA as a pure precursor of DNA.
Imagine the volumes of such random testing of equally random mutations that we know to occur in a few million cubic miles of nice warm chemically abundant marine waters, coupled with solar energy input and other stimuli. It would have been quite the life-affirming side show, huh?
As well, Dr. Craig Ventor of the Human Genoime Project (which the religious said could never be done... <cough>...) in San Diego has presented synthetic DNA, created partly from that naturally occurring RNA, into a lifeless lipid cell wall. Durned if it didn't close up on it's own, and form a replicating cell. But there you are, claiming in your vast biological, scientific and statistical ignorance, self-inflicted I might add, that absolutely, positively cannot ever happen, that we're just assuming insta-"magic". Yup: that'll be how we get our answers, for sure!
Of course the inherently high occurrence of lethal mutations is indeed to be expected, but you also ignore the consequences of a few positive mutations in a system that "remembers" such changes through biological replication. Why would a positive change not then be the one that is prolific in it's subsequent reproductive success? Why would it somehow be limited and thus die off on it's own?? Or alternately, why would such a potentially beneficial change not be carried on and thus supportive of a newly evolving (simply meaning "positively accumulated changes over time"...) complex organism? too complicated for you perhaps, but not for us.
You also expect, as is apparent in your officially inept description of functional evolution, for an overnight change of massive dimension and import, that... (what did you say again? Lessee... oh yeah: here it is!) "Then, magically, those legs became wings and birds suddenly came into being. Then, that cow that grew out of the fish, with all of it's 'magical' evolutionary jumps, walked back into the water and became whales and dolphins!"
Wow! That's better than Avatar, isn't it? But sadly, no-one, certainly no credible and peer-reviewed scientist ,has EVER claimed that's how it works. This must be the New-Age Abrahamic God interpretation of the Facts of Evolution.
So yup, sure: that's exactly how we claim it works, right? Say, did you perhaps miss the first 6 mo of lectures in basic biology in high school by chance? Or did you go to a Catholic or Southern Baptist school where independent thought, curiosity and imagination are all strictly Verboten?
And yet, you will righteously refuse to accept any such well-documented results. The SM (Scientific Method...) provides you and I with all the detailed methodology to replicate any published or reported experimental results, and yet, I have never seen any religious group fund up such a simple test!
So... whassa matter? Fear of The Truth gotchur tongue?
You also obviously do not understand the simple mathematics of exponential growth, coupled with the huge amount of time that has passed, and that co-emergent chemicals, occurring alongside each other, do indeed provide ample time and opportunity for an organism's DNA to better fit it's available and never-endingly changing niches.
So, in effect, you jump on some unrelated and impossible idea and then try to sell it to others, who would rather not understand any of how it really works, a total illusionary fabrication in order to denounce it entirely.
in mythology there was a myth that went something like this...
before there were humans the higher gods ran the universe together with lower gods, called the Igigi
The Igigi were workers and hated what they had to do in what should have been a paradise. They planned a mutiny and surrounded the palace of the big guy, the top god and wanted to kick him out of his position. Ea an advisor of the top dog, err god, said he should find others to do the job of the Igigi: Man, who would be made of clay and return to clay after death. So it came to be....
But humans created more humans and before you knew it there were too many. They fought amongst themselves and the gods were sick and tired of all the noise so decided to get rid of them. They sent plagues and drought and epidemics. Nothing worked so they decided a flood would do it. Ea did feel sorry for one wize man, Atrahasis whom he instructed to build a boat that he could save his family and his animals with. The flood lasted 7 days and then a raven sent out didn't return so he knew land was near and they went on it. The top god was furious at this but Ea explained people were needed to take care of the earth. He decided restrictions were in order. That's why some women can't have children, some die young....
this story told in Mesopothamia about 2000 years before the bible was written, led to the ark story..
in mythology there was a myth that went something like this...
before there were humans the higher gods ran the universe together with lower gods, called the Igigi
The Igigi were workers and hated what they had to do in what should have been a paradise. They planned a mutiny and surrounded the palace of the big guy, the top god and wanted to kick him out of his position. Ea an advisor of the top dog, err god, said he should find others to do the job of the Igigi: Man, who would be made of clay and return to clay after death. So it came to be....
But humans created more humans and before you knew it there were too many. They fought amongst themselves and the gods were sick and tired of all the noise so decided to get rid of them. They sent plagues and drought and epidemics. Nothing worked so they decided a flood would do it. Ea did feel sorry for one wize man, Atrahasis whom he instructed to build a boat that he could save his family and his animals with. The flood lasted 7 days and then a raven sent out didn't return so he knew land was near and they went on it. The top god was furious at this but Ea explained people were needed to take care of the earth. He decided restrictions were in order. That's why some women can't have children, some die young....
this story told in Mesopothamia about 2000 years before the bible was written, led to the ark story..
This post sounds like the first chapters of The Silmarillion.
I got it from a book I'm reading on the history of religious rites and how Christianity was started.."Petit traité d'histoire des religions" by Frédéric Lenoir
this story was supposedly found on 4000 year old tablets
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The way it's done, again and again. Proving... NADA again and again.
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