Have you done the math, John? It wouldn’t be especially sophisticated, I would think.
Then Dawkin’s statement is accurate: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Eddie,
I was commenting on your Noah’s mother’s comment. This system doesn’t put comments in nested trees so my comment looks like it was out of the blue but it really was a comment to the purposeful drowning of Noah’s mother.
wicked people? genocide? Come on. The Noah’s story is an abomination. (and complete fiction)
You sound no different from radical extremists justifying atrocities in the name of God. I can’t fathom you justifying genocide, even fictional genocide.
I have just skimmed down these posts, and the only conclusion I could reach is that, true or false, the Flood story ends up as divisive and ‘***off-putting’***. It may have had some raison d’être in the past, but is it deserving of the space it has taken up in this Forum?
Al leo
ISIS is saying the same thing today under the name of the same God. Pitiful Eddie, really pitiful.
No but it wrong to allow your daughter to be raped in the name of obedience to God.
(Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT) If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her.
(Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB) If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife.
Look the Bible has a lot of barbaric things in it. Don’t defend them. Just assign the stories to the scrapheap of history and live in the 21st century using 21st century reasoning, morals, and ethics.
When someone reads a story they need to read a story on it’s own terms. Would you call a tsunami that wiped out a town, genocide? Or would you call an earthquake that destroyed a whole town, genocide?
Genocide is the deliberate extermination of a particular race, simply because they belong to that race, and that genocide is carried out by people. The Noah story is carried out by God (not people), and it’s an extermination of people because of their wickedness and violence that escalated to an extreme (not because of their race). You’re misuse of that word is rather frustrating.
When a group of people committ genocide odds are that includes people that are completely innocent, people that are neutral, and people that are criminals. A story that says “there was great wickedness in the earth and great violence. And every imagination was only evil continually.” Does not imply that there was any innocent person on the earth. Those are details that you are adding to the story.
-Tim
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I was just curious about the numbers. You seem to have varied knowledge on several topics (mainly concerning theology and literature). I just find the numbers of particular interest… not because they are crucial to make a timeline (I don’t think you can make a concise timeline using the biblical genealogies)… I just happen to notice patterns and such.
-Tim
Patrick, to me, you just don’t understand. The 21 st century is not necessarily any better nor less barbaric than any other century, take your pick. Numerous examples even from our own living experience can be cited. Assigning the bible stories to the scrapheap of history is not much different than ascribing your opinions to the scrapheap of 21st century ignorance.
When you quote Deuteronomy, you are not taking into consideration the impact of the consequences or penalty for rape, or for deciding whether the act was rape or consensual. Nor are you considering the deterrent value. Thus if a girl did not cry out, it would appear not to be rape but to be consensual. You omitted the verse that says what happened if they were found in the country, where no one could hear them.
You might argue that the penalty was barbaric, and perhaps it is indeed very severe. But interestingly, the girl in the country did not get the penalty that the man who raped her did. How to get justice without witnesses, without cellphones, without tape recorders, and without mind readers… from a human perspective, a bit different than divine justice.
Eddie, while your perspective here is entirely understandable, yet I am not sure I would always wish the same thing, although I would be inclined to, especially when my family would be threatened. Yet, the mercy of God, and our own desire to see people repent, and to recognize the forgiveness of God even for murderers and thieves and terrorists still impacts me. Not that I have a good easy answer, because terrorists certainly deserve death. Yet, our death is not our demise, and it is still the beginning of a glorious future.
Today I heard a story in a sermon about a thirteen year old boy who was tortured in front of his father, who still would not renounce his faith, even though his son had his fingers cut off, was beaten near death, and then crucified by … guess who. His son did not want his father to deny his faith in Jesus. Did they want their torturers vaporized…? It’s more complicated, sometimes. I have no confidence I could have the same attitude, but I certainly do not condemn the father in this case either.
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I understand what you are trying to say, Eddie. But my appreciation of “source of truth” is different than “illustrating truth”. A false story cannot be a source of truth, although possibly as a parable it might reveal an explanation or illustration of a truth, which would have to have its source somewhere else. On the other hand, if the story is purportedly the only “source of this truth”, and then found to be false, or non-existant, the “source” disappears. If the only source disappears, then the illustration that remains, loses its reference point.
It’s getting to be a bit much for me to all respond to, due to family and other committments, but I will simply say that while I can’t remember how long it took to correlate a reasonable growth rate to today’s population, it seemed to me to be quite reasonable. As far as how many people existed globally a few generations after the flood, there is lots of speculation about what that population might have been, and admittedly no comprehensive concrete data. Since we do not know what infant mortality was like at the time, nor what diseases prevailed, but do know that some of the early people lived a lot longer than we do today, and apparently had large families, which barely mention the daughters, of which there was likely very many, then to be adamant about this does not make sense. Geographical spread, as highlighted in the story of Babel, and recognizing that to travel across a continent might take a year or two, is not a significant problem in the time period in question. All scientists and ordinary people know that people spread across the globe; the question of how long it took does not change this fact. We suppose, because we have been conditioned to do so, that this would have taken eons, but that is as much speculation as supposing it all happened in a decade.
Your argument that parts of Genesis are told like a fable, is in my view not sustainable. As a parallel, even parables are not told as if untrue, from a literature perspective, but rather told in a way to illustrate a point, rather than name the characters, locations, or specific time periods in which such a story might have happened. Interestingly, Genesis does the exact opposite, by naming the characters, connecting them to children who are also named, and putting them into historic context. And it does not provide a moral lesson so much as rather a raison d’etre for life, the purpose of life, and the difficulty of life, and the hope of life. It takes more than mere reason to accept it; it also takes faith and trust.