@mburtonk I just listened to something that connects the scablands flood to a cometary impact in the polar ice cap 12,500 years ago. I've heard of the comet but I've never heard the theory that connects it to sudden mega flooding.
One should note that according to the Bible rain WAS NOT the only source of the flood waters. "fountains of the deep"
The Koran says the same thing, attributing the rise equally to rain (which is impossible in this universe) and fountains of the deep (which don't and can't exist for obvious geological reasons). But it is about the level of understanding of the natural world that you would expect from people not that far removed from the stone age. What's more interesting is that although the story really doesn't make any sense in terms of Judeo/Christianity or Islam, it probably made a great deal of sense in some of the polytheistic pagan religions from which it was obviously taken. The story element that pre-flood people had a much longer lifespan that post flood people is in the Genesis account, the Koran, and in the original Sumerian, where the flood was caused by Enki, god of the underworld and lord of the vast underground oceans. Thus, "fountains of the deep". But when rewritten for a single, omniscient, omnipotent god it doesn't really fit - at all. Why would God screw up that badly, and why would he choose such a ridiculously stupid method of teaching man a lesson, which mankind as a whole obviously couldn't learn because only one family managed to survive the pointless deluge? Wouldn't a mass epiphany, perhaps from a burning bush, make a lot more sense? How about a nice plague? Then there's no need to fill a boat with a handful of animals and drown the whole planet, and event that obviously didn't take place or we wouldn't have been running around interbreeding with Neanderthals and hunting North American mammoths to extinction.
That's interesting, got a source? Obviously the earliest Christians (if you could call them such at that point) were basically Jews and had a very strong belief in the OT. I'm guessing the people you refer to are those who ran the branch of Christianity that originated with Paul. Also, who are you?
Was there an ark (a fancy word for a boat)? Yes. Was there a flood? Yes. Is it anything like as described in the Bible? Not even close. It's probably a tale that got handed down from generation to generation getting embellished along the way until we had one giant ship that held two of every animal on the planet in it.
One school of thought is that a lot of the flood stories originated during the flood that occurred when the Atlantic broke through at Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean basin. You can imagine what that would do the area where modern Israel and Egypt are located. According to the wiki article, waters could have risen as fast as ten meters per day.
If I had a time machine that's one of the first things I'd want to see - that moment when the Atlantic spilled over. That and the abovementioned Scablands flood. "Spectacular" is probably waaaay inadequate.
That would be a strange school, because the Mediterranean flooded 5.3 million years ago and the only witnesses would've been Ardipithecus kadabba (it was another two million years before Australopithicus afarensis, aka Lucy, arrived), so the story would have to be passed down from a bipedal monkey with a brain the size of a chimpanzee - and passed from generation to generation prior to language, for 5.3 million years. The Black Sea flood hypothesis by Ryan and Pitman was plausible, suggesting the flood occurred 5,600 years ago when the Mediterranean poured through the Bosphorus, but subsequent Russian research has shown there wasn't any such flood. Yep. Rome had a little problem when they realized that rabbis, who edited the books that make up the Old Testament, were still editing. Holy smokes, the non-believers are the writers and producers in charge of text of The Original Series! Not just any non-believers, either, but the heavies in most of storylines for the Expanded Universe. Meetings were held - accusations, protests, lots of screaming. The whole Old Testament canon could've been replaced by an intro that said "Previously, on 'This is Our Religion'." Still, it wasn't as bad as the relations between the original series writers and the producers of the later Arabic reboot. Their take on the TOS fandom is to drive them into the sea and kill them all.
Seems to me there was a flood in the Black seas region as well, as there were apparently some kind of settlements found in the shallower water of it. Also there's the flooding that would have occurred at the end of the ice age, not only glacial lakes, but also coastal areas as the sea level rose again.
I didn't find anything (quick search) on the comet/flooding combination, but this article on comet/cooling might be interesting to some.
There are hundreds of floods that have occurred over the last 30,000 years. Some of them or none of them may be responsible for the flood myth that eventually entered the bible. But the chances of us ever knowing for sure.... almost none...
You have to interpret the flood story thu the lens of the "telephone game." Origin was probably a glacial damn bursting and unleashing a flood on a large valley or lowlands of some kind. Told and re-told down the generations it became angry god(s) unleashing a horrible vengeance upon mankind. The Israelites come along and adopt the story into their monotheistic religion and from there it morphs into the familiar Noah and the Ark deal.
The flood story is probably one of many existing stories that were modified and used by the Bible's J author, possibly a woman, who wrote the core text with the great themes and cool stories, and onto which things were added over time by E, D, and P. The original work is more like a brilliant novel and was possibly called "In the Day", going by period Semitic naming conventions. A recent theory is that J wrote the Torah (and parts on into Kings) fairly late (possibly during the exile) to serve as a prehistory and back story for older preexisting texts that appear later in the Bible. Many of the fun stories come from J, like Adam and Eve, the coat of many colors, Noah's flood, the Tower of Babel, Samson and Delilah. So debating the flood is a bit like discussing whether Samson's power really came from his flowing hair, or whether all the linguists are wrong and God afflicted us with multiple languages because we were building a stairway to Heaven.
PBS Nova program on the discovery of the tablet and attempts to build a replica of the ark described in it.
Much as I hate to pull a thread off-topic, especially one that recovered from being so already, I thought it was Mary who was supposed to be born of a virgin, not Jesus.
Yeah. The Jesus family was from a long line of virgins. They just had some weird genes. Occasionally women screw up and produce an egg with a full set of chromosomes, in effect cloning themselves. An XXY female could in theory not only rebuild a transmission or remachine cylinder heads, but produce a male offspring by losing one of the X's. That's far more probable than some iron age primitive's mother making shit up to keep from getting a beating.
If I had a time machine I would love to explore the low-lying coastal areas that were lost around 4000 BC under the rising oceans. How many interesting groups will we never know of because their civilisations were lost beneath the waves.
It think you may be confusing the virgin birth with the immaculate conception, which is what Catholic dogma insists applies to Mary rather than Jesus, contrary to poular perception.
I thought they were one and the same. The only thing in Catholic dogma I can't think of that applies to Mary was the idea of "perpetual virginity". The idea (not backed up by anything in the New Testament) that Mary remained a virgin her entire life.
No, the Catholic doctrine is that Mary herself was born without original sin and that only one sperm cell swam up her mother's hoohoo (thus making her conception immaculate).
Citation needed. I wikied it and you are right. No idea why Catholics hold Mary in such veneration. I see nothing in the New Testament that supports much of what they believe regarding her.
