Big Flood Revisited
I've never cared much for the story of Noah's Ark. Maybe it has something to do with the image of an angry vengeful God so angry with his creation that He would destroy everyone and everything -- although He really loves us, which we would do well to remember lest he Smite Us Into Oblivion out of His Love For Us.
But I suspect a lot more of it the enthusiasm with which religious fundamentalists take to the story. After all, most Christian fundamentalists, at least, really take to the image of an angry vengeful God, so the Noah's Ark story would appeal to them out of the same impulse that produced the horrible Left Behindseries of End Time novels.
Perhaps what appeals to them even more, however, is the way in which this story, in particular, requires a complete suspension of belief in science and reason, which is mandatory, since to a fundamentalist, every last chapter and verse of Scripture must be accepted in the literality of the language of King James I of England. Which means that not only was the world created in seven literal days. but God destroyed the world in a Literal Flood that resulted from 40 days and 40 nights of non-stop rain, producing a flood so deep that it submerged all land, presumably right to the top of Mount Everest.
Now, if you have the slightest respect for science and reason, there are a lot of problems with this story. Like how, once the waters reached a depth of 25,000 feet plus, they somehow didn't freeze in the extremely thin air of the stratosphere, and how was Noah and his family and his zoo able to breathe? The Bible doesn't say anything about life support systems.
To me, an even bigger question was where exactly did all the water come from, anyway? After all, we've known at least since the 1960s -- when I read about it in one of those grade school science books that fundamentalists so detest -- exactly how deep a flood is possible on this planet. Specifically, this biggest story of water available for a flood is frozen in the polar ice caps. If something should happen to cause the polar ice caps to melt all at once, the oceans would rise by about 200 feet.
Now that's a pretty significant flood, and for sure, you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building. But 200 feet does not put an Ark 10,000 feet up Mount Ararat, no way, no how. It just doesn't.
Now, if we were ancient Hebrews, we would have no problem figuring out where all the water came from. To the Hebrews of 1000 BC, the earth was a flat disk floating in a vast Universal ocean. What kept the water of this universal ocean off the surface of the earth was a great big inverted bowl overhead, which we call the sky and the King James fundies called the "firmament."
Now this firmament bowl kept the earth very dry -- and in the world of the ancient Hebrews, most places were dry-as-a-bone desert. When God wanted the plants to grow, he would open these floodgates mounted in the firmament just a little tiny bit, letting in just enough water to make it rain for a bit.
At the time of the Great Flood, as described in a certain amount of detail in the Book of Genesis, God opened up the floodgates all the way and left them open for 40 days. The earth filled up with water like one of those crystal ball toys in Citizen Kane.
Of course, no one believes that today... or maybe some do. After all, a widely reported survey from a number of years ago revealed that something like 25% or 30% of Americans did not believe the moon landings ever happened. They believe they were faked on a Hollywood sound stage somewhere. If was a significant enough finding that Hollywood actually produced a movie based on that premise.
The Noah's Ark story did, however, teach me a valuable lesson about the nature of religious fundamentalists and the length to which some of them will go to defend their peculiar take on reality.
Back in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Michigan State University, I started dating a young woman from Westminster College, a Presbyterian school in New Wilmington, PA. I traveled there to visit her several times, and found that she and her circle of friends were fundamentalist Christians. (That puts them a couple orders of magnitude in faith beyond the college's United Presbyterian Church, which officially does not require its members to believe that the universe popped into being 8,000 years ago or that evolution is some kind of myth perpetuated by godless atheistic scientists.)
On one visit to New Wilmington, I got into quite a discussion with one of her friends over my lack of belief in the literality of the Book of Genesis. Specifically, I brought up the "where did all the water come from" question. He said he had no problem believing in the Great Flood. What convinced him, he said, was the existence of a thin layer of sedimentary rock found at the exact same depth everywhere in the world -- across all types of terrain, under the mountaintops, below the bottom of the ocean, everywhere -- and that this rock layer could only be explained by some sort of Universal Flood in recent history.
Now I was no geologist, ans so I had no direct knowledge to affirm or refute this assertion. So all I could say was that I had never heard of such a thing but would be willing to check it out.
And that's exactly what I did. Shortly after arriving back in East Lansing, I went to see a professor in the MSU Department of Geology and asked him about this alleged layer of sedimentary rock.
The professor looked at me for a moment, then started laughing and laughing. I thought he was going to piss his pants, he laughed so hard. When he finally caught his breath, the professor said that I'd been hoodwinked, and I was far from the first student he'd ever seen who'd been fooled in this way. There was no such layer of rock. The Fundies had just made it up. There were questions they couldn't answer, so they just made something up in hopes that people would be fooled into believing the account in the Book of Genesis.
And so I learned a very valuable lesson. If someone -- for reasons religious, political, or whatever -- is trying to convince me of something that appears to defy all reason or logic, that thing probasbly does defy all reason and logic, and this person is not to be trusted. About anything.
But I suspect a lot more of it the enthusiasm with which religious fundamentalists take to the story. After all, most Christian fundamentalists, at least, really take to the image of an angry vengeful God, so the Noah's Ark story would appeal to them out of the same impulse that produced the horrible Left Behindseries of End Time novels.
Perhaps what appeals to them even more, however, is the way in which this story, in particular, requires a complete suspension of belief in science and reason, which is mandatory, since to a fundamentalist, every last chapter and verse of Scripture must be accepted in the literality of the language of King James I of England. Which means that not only was the world created in seven literal days. but God destroyed the world in a Literal Flood that resulted from 40 days and 40 nights of non-stop rain, producing a flood so deep that it submerged all land, presumably right to the top of Mount Everest.
Now, if you have the slightest respect for science and reason, there are a lot of problems with this story. Like how, once the waters reached a depth of 25,000 feet plus, they somehow didn't freeze in the extremely thin air of the stratosphere, and how was Noah and his family and his zoo able to breathe? The Bible doesn't say anything about life support systems.
To me, an even bigger question was where exactly did all the water come from, anyway? After all, we've known at least since the 1960s -- when I read about it in one of those grade school science books that fundamentalists so detest -- exactly how deep a flood is possible on this planet. Specifically, this biggest story of water available for a flood is frozen in the polar ice caps. If something should happen to cause the polar ice caps to melt all at once, the oceans would rise by about 200 feet.
Now that's a pretty significant flood, and for sure, you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building. But 200 feet does not put an Ark 10,000 feet up Mount Ararat, no way, no how. It just doesn't.
Now, if we were ancient Hebrews, we would have no problem figuring out where all the water came from. To the Hebrews of 1000 BC, the earth was a flat disk floating in a vast Universal ocean. What kept the water of this universal ocean off the surface of the earth was a great big inverted bowl overhead, which we call the sky and the King James fundies called the "firmament."
Now this firmament bowl kept the earth very dry -- and in the world of the ancient Hebrews, most places were dry-as-a-bone desert. When God wanted the plants to grow, he would open these floodgates mounted in the firmament just a little tiny bit, letting in just enough water to make it rain for a bit.
At the time of the Great Flood, as described in a certain amount of detail in the Book of Genesis, God opened up the floodgates all the way and left them open for 40 days. The earth filled up with water like one of those crystal ball toys in Citizen Kane.
Of course, no one believes that today... or maybe some do. After all, a widely reported survey from a number of years ago revealed that something like 25% or 30% of Americans did not believe the moon landings ever happened. They believe they were faked on a Hollywood sound stage somewhere. If was a significant enough finding that Hollywood actually produced a movie based on that premise.
The Noah's Ark story did, however, teach me a valuable lesson about the nature of religious fundamentalists and the length to which some of them will go to defend their peculiar take on reality.
Back in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Michigan State University, I started dating a young woman from Westminster College, a Presbyterian school in New Wilmington, PA. I traveled there to visit her several times, and found that she and her circle of friends were fundamentalist Christians. (That puts them a couple orders of magnitude in faith beyond the college's United Presbyterian Church, which officially does not require its members to believe that the universe popped into being 8,000 years ago or that evolution is some kind of myth perpetuated by godless atheistic scientists.)
On one visit to New Wilmington, I got into quite a discussion with one of her friends over my lack of belief in the literality of the Book of Genesis. Specifically, I brought up the "where did all the water come from" question. He said he had no problem believing in the Great Flood. What convinced him, he said, was the existence of a thin layer of sedimentary rock found at the exact same depth everywhere in the world -- across all types of terrain, under the mountaintops, below the bottom of the ocean, everywhere -- and that this rock layer could only be explained by some sort of Universal Flood in recent history.
Now I was no geologist, ans so I had no direct knowledge to affirm or refute this assertion. So all I could say was that I had never heard of such a thing but would be willing to check it out.
And that's exactly what I did. Shortly after arriving back in East Lansing, I went to see a professor in the MSU Department of Geology and asked him about this alleged layer of sedimentary rock.
The professor looked at me for a moment, then started laughing and laughing. I thought he was going to piss his pants, he laughed so hard. When he finally caught his breath, the professor said that I'd been hoodwinked, and I was far from the first student he'd ever seen who'd been fooled in this way. There was no such layer of rock. The Fundies had just made it up. There were questions they couldn't answer, so they just made something up in hopes that people would be fooled into believing the account in the Book of Genesis.
And so I learned a very valuable lesson. If someone -- for reasons religious, political, or whatever -- is trying to convince me of something that appears to defy all reason or logic, that thing probasbly does defy all reason and logic, and this person is not to be trusted. About anything.
posted by Da Zedman at 9:15 PM
1 Comments:
You write very well.
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