I don’t want to go into whether the flood was global or local, and if so what the extent was. But if you’re saying that the flood was a natural event, that just happened, then I’d expect there to be evidence left behind that was both obvious and local to that area.
Things have been a lot worse than they are. A lot worse. Taiping rebellion worse, year without a summer worse, mini-ice age worse, Spanish flu/WWI worse, bubonic plague worse. They could be a lot worse again.
How bad would it have to have been before God went “no further”? Losing 50% of the population of an entire continent? 75%? 90%?
If what we see today is the result of God saying “This far, but no farther!”, why was it often so much worse?
Your position seems invulnerable - however bad things get, that’s how bad God allows things to get.
To build up a charge one layer has to be grounded. From Wikipedia on Leyden jars.
And nowhere in the description of how the ark was built is mention made of making an electrical connection to the inner layer which is required if you want to make it a capacitor.
Now I’m confused… but that seems to be a way of building a stronger electric field on the inner layer when using an electrostatic generator, I don’t know I’m a bit out of my element here. If the outer layer is grounded though, its going to be neutralized so you don’t get a shock from touching it.
I’m just going to defer back to the electrical engineer I sourced earlier, that supported the idea that the Ark was a capacitor. Any electrical engineers or someone in a related field here?
I first encountered this idea back in the seventies from the pages of Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Of course aliens built the pyarmids, how else could they find their landing spot?
I’m not an EE, but several immediate deal breakers present themselves. As I have it, mechanical rubbing of the wood construction against the gold plating is supposed to charge up the ark as it was carried. But as both the inner and outer surfaces are the same wood - gold interface, there is no directional preference for positive and negative charge build up. Secondly, the charge separation being the width of the wood is huge for a capacitor, so that would not work well. Third, if the lip of the ark was also gold plated, that would short the inner and outer surfaces together, so forget charge separation. Also bear in mind that such capacitors dissipate their charge over time, and if I could fix that I could become very rich.
Think about it, how many people have been electrocuted by a wooden wheelbarrow with separated metal surfaces? There are a lot of ways to go, but that is not one to worry about.
If you want to check these notions more rigorously, by all means have at it. Let me know how it goes.
Nope and nope. A literal Adam & Eve, Garden of Eden, Noah and the global Flood are all demonstrably false. So the choice is this: Either reject early Genesis as untrue, or understand the text in a different way. Your approach has led millions of people to abandon Christianity in the last 25 years. (Also demonstrably true.) It’s the opposite of evangelism.
There is no such thing as a “Symbolic theological model.” Certain texts must be read metaphorically, but that doesn’t rob them of “truth.” Jesus wasn’t symbolic. He was a real man who walked the earth 2000 years ago. As the creeds say, I believe he will return to judge the living and dead. That’s a matter of faith.
You don’t understand the reference. Early Christian and Medieval interpretation of Scripture held that every passage held all four meanings and should be interpreted in all four ways.
Easy for most folks, unless you can’t also recognize genre of myth as part of Scripture, such as the polemical take on ANE mythology in Genesis 1-11.
I took a course where we had to apply that principle to other ancient literature, with laughable results. I think the point was that trying to force any given passage to bear all four was silly, while at the same time looking at each of the four for any given passage could be useful – but the professor was very inscrutable on such lessons, never actually stating them.
Or can’t admit that Moses would make use of literary types he and the Israelites were familiar with, even when those literary types fit portions of Genesis almost perfectly!
Or any of the Mesopotamian ones!
In comparison, if the early Genesis genealogies are approached as kings lists, they come across as more subtle and sophisticated than the others, with the symbolism not so blatant and requiring more thought.
edit: It’s also worth noting that by comparison with the kings lists there is a message in Genesis 5, sort of “You guys are a bunch of blowhard braggarts; the kings before the flood may have been special but they were just mortals, not living for millennia!”
Relabel “Form” to “Structure” and “Use” to “Filling” and it’s the basic temple inauguration pattern, where the seventh day is when the deity inhabits the temple after the sixth day when the image is installed. In the ANE, that “inhabiting” was called “rest”, so in the temple inauguration theme God rested because He had put His image in the temple. The chart also shows the contrast between the chaos of “Before the first day” and the calm order of “God rests”.
Definitely not a literal history – it’s far more creative and informative than that.
@glipsnort wrote a post in the distant past that still makes me giggle.
“A story with a talking snake, a man named Man, a woman named Living, a tree whose fruit gives knowledge of good and evil, another tree whose fruit gives eternal life, and a god who walks around in a garden – this reads to you like a literal account? Holy smokes.”
I often feel like paraphrasing it and making it my own, but can’t quite do it. When you boil the story down to its parts, it does seem ludicrous to think it is describing a literal history.
. . . but, traditions often have their own inertia. That is true of many things in society, including Christian theology. It can be difficult to separate non-essential human traditions from the scriptural text.
The one scripture I keep coming back to on this topic is when Jesus asked for someone without sin to cast the first stone against the woman accused of adultery. Jesus pointed out that they had all sinned. He didn’t say that they were all sinful because they inherited original sin from Adam. No. They had each sinned on their own.
So I’m with you on the Original Sin tradition. It doesn’t seem necessary.
