The Great Flood

This is for the Christians on the site who think that the bible is literally true, or that the Great Flood actually occurred.

Gen 7:21-24
And all the flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beast, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He (God) blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark (seven other people). And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.

http://travel.webshots.com/album/252665192ssHtdn?start=0

The link provided above is a small photo archive of some of the victims of the 2004 tsunami that killed at least 225,000 people around the Indian Ocean. That is a very small sampling of what it looks like to drown a quarter of a million people. Magnify that at least a hundred times and you begin to comprehend the magnitude of the carnage wrought by God in the Great Flood. Now imagine a little snapshot in God’s comprehensive photo album of all the millions upon millions of people he drowned. Each of them had a name. Each of them was an individual who had a flesh and blood life. Each of them had hopes, dreams, and fears. Each of them was someone’s father, or mother, son, daughter, husband or wife. The day before the rain started they all had plans, ideas, ambitions and projects. They loved, they ate, they slept, they worked and they raised their families. But God put an end to that. Except for Noah and his seven companions, he drowned them all. Each and every one.

Unless you can visualize what they looked like, or imagine what they were doing on the day the rain started, or empathize with the terror each and every one of them felt as the flood waters rose above their necks while they watched helplessly as their friends and loved ones drowned all around them, unless you can do these things then there is something fundamentally wrong with your humanity. Unless you can imagine your own family in that same situation and feel that there was some great injustice done at that time, then there is a deficiency in your character that will require more than God’s “saving grace” to heal.

When the waters receded, the complete devastation that we saw along the whole rim of the Indian Ocean in 2004 is what would have occurred in every land in every continent across the earth. Tens of millions of corpses, bloated and rotting beneath the gaze of a wrathful god. Did they have it coming? Were they all that “wicked and corrupt?” Even the infants? Were they any more or less wicked and corrupt than our present generation? If we are still wicked and corrupt today, did the flood do any good at all? Why couldn’t God have sent Jesus to die for their sins too, instead of just drowning them en masse? Couldn’t an all powerful god have come up with some other, less brutal solution? Wouldn’t an all knowing god have foreseen the problem and done something differently? Wouldn’t an all loving god have necessarily done so?

A god of infinite love and compassion is simply incompatible with the genocidal act of drowning all but eight of the earth’s populace. Neither “free will” nor “Satan” makes the incompatibility any less glaring. For my part, I can only conclude that your definition of god is incoherent and that he therefore cannot exist, or that he is a genocidal monster who is more worthy of condemnation than praise.

Originally posted by rwingett
That is a very small sampling of what it looks like to drown a quarter of a million people. Magnify that at least a hundred times and you begin to comprehend the magnitude of the carnage wrought by God in the Great Flood. Now imagine a little snapshot in God’s comprehensive photo album of all the millions upon millions of people he drowned.

Does anyone know if the Bible actually states what the population of the earth was?

Each of them had a name. Each of them was an individual who had a flesh and blood life. Each of them had hopes, dreams, and fears. Each of them was someone’s father, or mother, son, daughter, husband or wife. The day before the rain started they all had plans, ideas, ambitions and projects. They loved, they ate, they slept, they worked and they raised their families. But God put an end to that. Except for Noah and his seven companions, he drowned them all. Each and every one.
And supposedly each and every one of them was such a terrible sinner that they deserved death. If they were all tried in a court of law and found guilty of crimes befitting the death penalty would you be more willing to agree with God?
Just playing Creationists advocate here. 🙂

When the waters receded, the complete devastation that we saw along the whole rim of the Indian Ocean in 2004 is what would have occurred in every land in every continent across the earth. Tens of millions of corpses, bloated and rotting beneath the gaze of a wrathful god.
Not so at all. You see at that time only New Zealand was populated. Noah in his ark was carried to the Middle east during the flood and thus did not see any rotting human corpses. Besides I suspect that God included a few extra sharks in his miracle flood
to deal with the rotting corpse problem anyway.

Did they have it coming? Were they all that “wicked and corrupt?” Even the infants?
Yes - the Bible says so.

Wouldn’t an all knowing god have foreseen the problem and done something differently?
God is not all knowing. It violates free will. Obviously if he could have foreseen the problem he could simply use birth control to achieve the same effect.

If God is all knowing he could easily prevent the millions of infant deaths that we experience today by simply causing them not to be born in the first place.

A god of infinite love and compassion is simply incompatible with the genocidal act of drowning all but eight of the earth’s populace.
Is an all knowing god of infinite love and compassion compatible with allowing you to exist and post this post which clearly is going to cause suffering amongst the creationists? Isn't the tiniest little bit of pain incompatible with an all loving God? Or is it more complicated than that?

Originally posted by rwingett
This is for the Christians on the site who think that the bible is literally true, or that the Great Flood actually occurred.

[b]Gen 7:21-24
[i]And all the flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beast, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life d ...[text shortened]... cannot exist, or that he is a genocidal monster who is more worthy of condemnation than praise.[/b]

One word, my friend: Sin
God saw that the world was full of sin; while those people were living life and hoping and dreaming as you stated, they were also involved in adultry, homosexuality, pedophilia, murder, stealing, and worshipping idols or pseudo-Gods. God found ONLY ONE righteous man, and he along with his family went forth before the flood, survived, multiplied by the millions, and society today is what we have. God will visit wrath upon this world again, and it is not too far away because we are living the life as those people did during Noah's time.

BTW, by you calculations, the total number of people that perished comes to 22,500,000. More people were lost during WWII.

Originally posted by dystoniac
One word, my friend: Sin
God saw that the world was full of sin; while those people were living life and hoping and dreaming as you stated, they were also involved in adultry, homosexuality, pedophilia, murder, stealing, and worshipping idols or pseudo-Gods.

Were those the only sins, and did every single person engage in them? Which of those sins (or others) deserve death?

God found ONLY ONE righteous man,
What is a 'righteous man'? Clearly Noah was not without sin.

God will visit wrath upon this world again, and it is not too far away because we are living the life as those people did during Noah's time.
So do we all deserve death? What sin am I committing that deserves death? I dont think I have commited any of the ones you have listed.
Which ones are you guilty of?

BTW, by you calculations, the total number of people that perished comes to 22,500,000. More people were lost during WWII.
How is that relevant? Did God start WWII as well?

Originally posted by dystoniac
One word, my friend: Sin
God saw that the world was full of sin; while those people were living life and hoping and dreaming as you stated, they were also involved in adultry, homosexuality, pedophilia, murder, stealing, and worshipping idols or pseudo-Gods. God found ONLY ONE righteous man, and he along with his family went forth before the flood, survi ...[text shortened]... e total number of people that perished comes to 22,500,000. More people were lost during WWII.

And all 22.5 million of them - every single one - were thieves and murderers?

Not even one guy who never stole anything or killed anyone? Does that even strike you as likely?

You know there had to be at least one little 98 lb man somewhere who was too weak and afraid to risk trying it.

Do you also consider the infants and children of the time to be 'evil' somehow? If so, please explain.

Originally posted by dystoniac
One word, my friend: Sin
God saw that the world was full of sin; while those people were living life and hoping and dreaming as you stated, they were also involved in adultry, homosexuality, pedophilia, murder, stealing, and worshipping idols or pseudo-Gods. God found ONLY ONE righteous man, and he along with his family went forth before the flood, survi e total number of people that perished comes to 22,500,000. More people were lost during WWII.

That you think it is justified for God to systematically exterminate people for some of those 'sins' (like adultery, homosexuality, theft, idol worship, etc) is bizarre enough. (Yours is a death and punishment cult.) But consider also that your argument does not even extend to any number of moral patients that also would have been cruelly exterminated in the flood. For example, young persons who are not even yet capable of making moral judgments (let alone blameworthy moral judgments)**. For another example, all manner of "lower" animals and species that suffered and died in the flood (and yet were not even capable of sinning).

EDIT:

**I see SwissGambit already beat me to this point.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
And all 22.5 million of them - every single one - were thieves and murderers?

He didn't say that. Most of them were homosexuals 🙂
One wonders then why he couldn't simply put all the homosexual men to live in peace and happiness on one continent and all the homosexual women on another continent and wait for them to die off (as no reproduction would take place).

One also wonders whether or not he believes homosexuality to be a sin worthy of the death even today.

Originally posted by rwingett

A god of infinite love and compassion is simply incompatible with the genocidal act of drowning all but eight of the earth’s populace.

If you're going to beat folks with the gnarled knobbed cudgel of literalism, consider ths: The Great Flood (an almost universal cultural object) may be a Mitochondrial Myth.

You also need to tailor your outrage for lower numbers -- it's quite unlikely that there were 'millions' of people to drown in those foggy times ... Estimates vary from 3-5 millions at 10 000 BC, so Nobodaddy would have looked small compared to Genghis Khan.

But the most folklorically riveting detail that comes to mind in connection with the tsunami is the people -- the primitive savages of the Andaman Isles -- who knew to go to higher ground before the floods came up and had their own, strikingly Biblical, even, ideas about the nature of the catastrophe -- according to a documentary I saw, the gist of which is as follows:
"They believe that life is a struggle between the good and the evil spirits and good spirits always saves its believers from the evil spirits. Even here, when the men in this tribe noticed the sea retracting just before the Tsunami, they believed that evil spirits were pushing the sea back and the good spirits would soon defeat the evil ones and push the sea back to its shores. When they realized this, they started moving inland, as they feared that the good spirits would push the sea back with a lot of force and this force could devastate the shores of the island.

This made them travel farther inland and watch the struggle between the ‘Good and the Evil’ from the safety of the mountains. They were eventually saved by their beliefs, while in the case of civilized men; we ran towards the sea, after seeing it retract, fascinated by the sudden change and eventually got drowned when the sea came back. I wonder how we could call these people uncivilized. They seem to have a better knowledge on ‘Nature’, than we do."
http://www.clipp.org/articles/content/15.php

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
"I wonder how we could call these people uncivilized. They seem to have a better knowledge on ‘Nature’, than we do."

An odd comment. Being civilized has nothing to do with knowledge of nature but rather tends to lead to a poorer knowledge of raw nature as a civilization tends to to some extent tame nature in its immediate surroundings.

I think the story speaks more of more civilized mans ego in thinking that he cannot be harmed and thus goes to investigate oddities whereas less civilized peoples tend to be afraid and get out of there.

I know that back in Zambia, I would probably have been more likely to get bitten by a snake than my less educated friends because I thought I understood snakes and was curious - they would just run or would try to kill a snake.
In reality they probably knew more about snakes but were less interested in getting to know them and more interested in simply using the tried and trusted solution.

Originally posted by dystoniac
God will visit wrath upon this world again, and it is not too far away because we are living the life as those people did during Noah's time.

I am curious.
Do you think that average human behavior has got significantly worse? Over what period? Have we got worse in the last 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years? Do we behave worse than the Egyptians of the OT, or the Jews of that time?
To what extent do you have good evidence for that belief, or is it just a feeling?

Originally posted by twhitehead
I am curious.
Do you think that average human behavior has got significantly worse? Over what period? Have we got worse in the last 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years? Do we behave worse than the Egyptians of the OT, or the Jews of that time?
To what extent do you have good evidence for that belief, or is it just a feeling?

Are our leaders better or worse than the Borgias, for example?

Originally posted by dystoniac
One word, my friend: Sin
God saw that the world was full of sin; while those people were living life and hoping and dreaming as you stated, they were also involved in adultry, homosexuality, pedophilia, murder, stealing, and worshipping idols or pseudo-Gods. God found ONLY ONE righteous man, and he along with his family went forth before the flood, survi ...[text shortened]... e total number of people that perished comes to 22,500,000. More people were lost during WWII.

We are living just as God designed us. If God wanted different behavior, then he should have designed us differently. When he examined his finished blueprint for the first man, he knew in advance the very second when he would drown the resulting populace. He went ahead anyway, knowing that his design would displease him and that he would have to start over again. He also knew that starting over again would produce the exact same results. Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results have been defined as insanity. Do you wish to claim that your god is incompetent to stand trial due to reasons of insanity?

My population estimate is obviously a very rough one. It is true that some 56 million people died in WWII. But we do not praise Hitler as an being "all loving" for his actions. We rightly condemn him. You god is in the same boat with Hitler and deserves the same condemnation.

Originally posted by rwingett
This is for the Christians on the site who think that the bible is literally true, or that the Great Flood actually occurred.

[b]Gen 7:21-24
And all the flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beast, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life d ...[text shortened]... not exist, or that he is a genocidal monster who is more worthy of condemnation than praise.[/b]

You are applying your inferior logic to the actions of a superior being. Do you think the birds can understand why we need to demolish a 10 story building to put up another, and in the process destroy the breeding places of hundreds of birds? Or the rabbits appreciate that we need to dig up the ground to build and in the process kill countless rabbits. You place far too much value on human life.

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
If you're going to beat folks with the gnarled knobbed cudgel of literalism, consider ths: The Great Flood (an almost universal cultural object) may be a Mitochondrial Myth.

You also need to tailor your outrage for lower numbers -- it's quite unlikely that there were 'millions' of people to drown in those foggy times ... Estimates vary from 3-5 mill ...[text shortened]... a better knowledge on ‘Nature’, than we do."
http://www.clipp.org/articles/content/15.php

Quibbling about the exact number of people drowned is the weakest possible defense imaginable. Does it really make a difference if it was "only" three to five million people? If Hitler had exterminated only 2 million people during the Nazi Holocaust, instead of 6 million, do you think it would lessen the magnitude of the crime? Would he rate only one-third of the condemnation?

Originally posted by Rajk999
You are applying your inferior logic to the actions of a superior being. Do you think the birds can understand why we need to demolish a 10 story building to put up another, and in the process destroy the breeding places of hundreds of birds? Or the rabbits appreciate that we need to dig up the ground to build and in the process kill countless rabbits. You place far too much value on human life.

Birds and rabbits do not worship us as being "morally perfect" and "all loving" either. If they were capable of it, I'm sure they would condemn our behavior.