This may be the Christian perspective - but the rest of us understand that they're both Mythological stories - giving reference and meaning to events within a religious and cultural ethos.
It doesn't persist as something that is to be taken seriously as a literal fact... Flood myths persist because every major cultural center before the advent of more efficient ground transportation was located along a large water way - most of these being rivers throughout Mesopotamia. Cultures whose well-being was directly tied to the health and stability of their local river developed grand tales about past stories of flooding. When propagating tales about their cultures, and as a process of sharing competing tales with surrounding cultures, each flood mythology grew into something more than an actual recording of events.
As long as you understand that the
real events that you're describing here were localized river floods and not global submersions, then you're right.
To answer your last question - please read my previous paragraph.
http://www.aina.org/books/eog/eog.pdf
Why don't you apply this same level of discernment to your Biblical account? Wouldn't that let you observe them both through the same lens, removing your personal bias from the equation?
How is a modern retelling of Noah's flood any different?
A 500 year old man, with no real training, builds the largest wooden boat the world has ever seen so that an invisible voice in the sky can send him a pair of all the animals on the planet (which no one knew was a massive globe) and save them from a flood that submerged even the highest mountain peak. Then, the magic layer of water which somehow floated above the atmosphere was released onto the Earth (which no one knew was a massive globe) killing everything and everyone that wasn't on the boat... After that, this 500 year old man, and his sons and daughters repopulated the entire planet (which no one knew was a massive globe) and they all lived happily ever after - until they began sinning again, of course.
Don't these "couplets and phrases seem to point to recited fiction"?
Pretty unbelievable, right?
How is this any more ridiculous than the Biblical account?
Odysseus was able to survive a terrible tempest which killed his entire crew by quickly brandishing a few boards together to make a raft. Does the fact that his story seems more plausible make it an historical fact?
How is the Biblical account testable, pray tell?
If the encounters aren't built to be falsifiable, then what are you actually saying here?
No NASA mission is focused on colonizing Mars... And it's not because "The Earth is doomed!" We're traveling to Mars because geological and chemical study with a human being in 3 days will be vastly more productive in determining if the planet ever once harbored life than the work of all the rovers over the past two decades.