• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

The Bible, Not As Original As You'd Think

Skwim

Veteran Member
Nope, you can't have it both ways. If God is omnipotent and omniscient the ultimate blame is upon him. If you want to claim that your God is incompetent you might have a valid claim, but he still looks like a fool for the action that he took. If you remember the myth God screwed the pooch because he forgot to gave man the ability to know right from wrong. That was the knowledge given to them by the tree that they were forbidden to eat from. As soon as they ate from it they knew how they screwed up. There is no way out of this. Plus the whole story makes no sense at all when one looks at it without emotional attachment. God made man without the knowledge of right and wrong. He puts the tree that would give them that knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Why did he do that if they were not to eat from that tree. He created and allowed the serpent, whether Satan or controlled by Satan, or just a snake, it does not really matter. He created and allowed that snake with its abilities into the Garden. That being convince Eve who convinced Adam. By the way, the Serpent was the only one that told the truth in that story. So why did God make Adam without this knowledge? Why did he put the tree in the garden? Why did he allow the snake in the garden? And then when they failed, which he should have known, why did he punish them for his own incompetence?

The Garden of Eden myth paints God as in incompetent and immoral creator. He screws up his creation and then blames his creation rather than himself.
Logic and even rational thinking are not the Bible's strong suits by any means.

.
 

1213

Well-Known Member
Please show me where I said "There were no 'fountains of the deep' ."

.

Ok, sorry, if I misunderstood. And nice if you don’t say there were not 'fountains of the deep'. I think it would be stupid to claim that they didn’t exist.
 

1213

Well-Known Member
You can learn yourself. A flood the size of the one in the Bible would have left evidence. There is none. The evidence we see tells us that there was no flood.

Sorry, I disagree with you, I think we have vast amount of evidence. I can’t deny the existence of the evidence.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Sorry, I disagree with you, I think we have vast amount of evidence. I can’t deny the existence of the evidence.
I can guarantee you that there is no scientific evidence for the flood, and you can confirm that by answering a simple question.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
Sorry, I disagree with you, I think we have vast amount of evidence. I can’t deny the existence of the evidence.
So there are still Christians who think the flood myths are not just borrowed from older cultures (even though every older culture has a flood myth)?
 

1213

Well-Known Member
So there are still Christians who think the flood myths are not just borrowed from older cultures (even though every older culture has a flood myth)?

Yes, I don’t believe Biblical flood story is copied to Bible from "older cultures" and I believe the flood really happened and we have lot of evidence for the flood.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Yes, I don’t believe Biblical flood story is copied to Bible from "older cultures" and I believe the flood really happened and we have lot of evidence for the flood.
Once again, there is no evidence for the flood. All you have is misinterpretation at best. All of the scientific evidence says that there was no flood.

Are you ready to attempt to prove for me that there is no scientific evidence for the flood? It is so much more convincing when those making false claims show themselves to be wrong.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
Yes, I don’t believe Biblical flood story is copied to Bible from "older cultures" and I believe the flood really happened and we have lot of evidence for the flood.

You say it like it's a vague theory, we know almost all cultures have a similar myth


Flood myth - Wikipedia
"
A flood myth or deluge myth is a narrative in which a great flood, usually sent by a deity or deities, destroys civilization, often in an act of divine retribution. Parallels are often drawn between the flood waters of these myths and the primaeval waters found in certain creation myths, as the flood waters are described as a measure for the cleansing of humanity, in preparation for rebirth. Most flood myths also contain a culture hero, who "represents the human craving for life".[1]

The flood myth motif is found among many cultures as seen in the Mesopotamian flood stories, Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek mythology, the Genesis flood narrative, Pralaya in Hinduism, the Gun-Yu in Chinese mythology, Bergelmir in Norse mythology, in the lore of the K'iche' and Maya peoples in Mesoamerica, the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa tribe of Native Americans in North America, the Muisca, and Cañari Confederation, in South America, and the Aboriginal tribes in southern Australia."



If you want an idea of how many

List of flood myths - Wikipedia

Flood myths are common across a wide range of cultures, extending back into Bronze Age and Neolithic prehistory. These accounts depict a flood, sometimes global in scale, usually sent by a deity or deities to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
Yes, I don’t believe Biblical flood story is copied to Bible from "older cultures" and I believe the flood really happened and we have lot of evidence for the flood.


If you look to actual science like geology and not apologetics bro-science there are times when sea level rises due to glacial shifts but:

"The scientific version of Noah's flood actually starts long before that, back during the last great glaciation some 20,000 years ago."
Evidence for a Flood | Science | Smithsonian


and

Young-Earth creationists claim that the Paleozoic sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon and the Mesozoic sedimentary rocks of the Grand Staircase north of the canyon, in which Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks occur, were deposited during Noah’s worldwide flood about 4,500 years ago (Hill 2002; Hill and Moshier 2009). I realize that readers of Skeptical Inquirer accept modern scientific views on this subject, but this examination of the creationist claims might be useful when communicating with others less imbued with scientific thinking.

There are at least twenty-one scientific reasons a worldwide flood recounted in the Bible cannot have happened.

  1. The stair-stepped appearance of erosion of sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon with sandstones and limestones forming cliffs and shales forming gentle slopes cannot happen if all these rocks were deposited in less than one year. If the Grand Canyon had been carved soon after these rocks were deposited by a worldwide flood, they would not have had time to harden into solid rock and would have been saturated with water. Therefore, the sandstones and limestones would have slumped during the carving of the canyon and would not have formed cliffs (Hill et al. 2016).
  2. Salt and gypsum deposits, more than 200 feet thick, occur in the Paradox Formation in Utah just 200 miles north of the Grand Canyon, and these deposits are the same age as the Supai rocks in the Grand Canyon that were supposedly also deposited by Noah’s flood. Similar salt deposits, up to 3,000 feet thick, exist in various places on all continents and in layers of all geologic ages, and these deposits can only be produced by evaporation of sea water. Such evaporation could not have happened in repeated intervals in the midst of the forty days and forty nights of raining and during the supposed continuous deposition of sedimentary rocks by a worldwide flood and in which the only drying and evaporation is said to have occurred at the end of the flood (Collins 2006; 2009; 2012; Hill et al. 2016).
  3. Sand dunes with giant cross bedding occur in the Mesozoic rocks in Zion National Park and are further evidence that desert conditions occurred at the time of the supposed flood (Senter 2011; Collins 2017).
  4. and lay their eggs while they were fleeing from rising waters to reach higher ground (Senter 2011; Hill et al. 2016).
19 more reasons at:
"Twenty-One Reasons Noah’s Worldwide Flood Never Happened - CSI




while it's possible there was a local flood the mythology contains all of the mythical narratives and hidden meaning that all of the other stories of floods contain. The story has inner meaning which I just learned doing research on it:

The Atrahasis Epic: The Great Flood & the Meaning of Suffering
The Atrahasis is the Akkadian/Babylonian epic of the Great Flood sent by the gods to destroy human life. Only the good man, Atrahasis (his name translates as `exceedingly wise') was warned of the impending deluge by the god Ea who instructed him to build an ark to save himself. Atrahasis heeded the words of the god, loaded two of every kind of animal into the ark, and so preserved human and animal life on earth.

Written down in the mid-17th century BCE, the Atrahasis can be dated by the colophon to the reign of the Babylonian King Hammurabi's great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646-1626 BCE) though the tale itself is considered much older, passed down through oral transmission. The Sumerian Flood Story (known as the `Eridu Genesis') which tells the same story, is certainly older (written down early 17th century BCE) and Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which also relates the tale of the Great Flood, is even older than that (2150-1400 BCE, though this is the date of the writing of Gilgamesh and it may well be that the Sumerian Flood story, in oral form, is actually older). While the story itself concerns a flood of universal proportions (even scaring the gods who unleashed it) most scholars recognize that it was probably inspired by a local event: flooding caused by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowing their banks.

While archaeological and geological evidence has shown such flooding was a fairly common occurrence, it is speculated that a particularly memorable flood served as the basis for the story. No recognized scholar working in the present day maintains the argument that there was ever a world-wide flood such as Atrahasis and the other accounts depict (including the story of Noah and his Ark in the Biblical book of Genesis). The Mesopotamian scholar Stephanie Dalley writes, "No flood deposits are found in third-millennium strata, and Archbishop Usher's date for the Flood of 2349 BC, which was calculated by using numbers in Genesis at face value...is now out of the question."

The Atrahasis begins after the creation of the world but before the appearance of human beings:
At first the gods enjoy the leisure the human workers afford them but, in time, the people become too loud and disturb the gods's rest. Enlil, the king of the gods, is especially annoyed by the constant disturbance from below and so decides to lessen the population by sending first a drought, then pestilence and then famine down upon the earth. After each of these plagues, the humans appeal to the god who first conceived of them, Enki, and he tells them what to do to end their suffering and return the earth to a natural, productive state. Enlil, finally, can stand no more and persuades the other gods to join him in sending a devastating flood to earth which will completely wipe out the human beings. Enki takes pity on his servant, the kind and wise Atrahasis, and warns him of the coming flood, telling him to build an ark and to seal two of every kind of animal within. Atrahasis does as he is commanded and the deluge begins:
The mother goddess, Nintu, weeps for the destruction of her children ("she was sated with grief, she longed for beer in vain") and the other gods weep with her.

After the waters subside Enlil and the other gods realize their mistake and regret what they have done; yet feel there is no way they can un-do it. At this point Atrahasis comes out of his ark and makes a sacrifice to the gods. Enlil, though only just before wishing he had not destroyed humanity, is now furious at Enki for allowing any one to escape alive. Enki explains himself to the assembly, the gods descend to eat of Atrahasis' sacrifice, and Enki then proposes a new solution to the problem of human overpopulation: create new creatures who will not be as fertile as the last. From now on, it is declared, there will be women who cannot bear children, demons who will snatch infants away and cause miscarriages, and women consecrated to the gods who will have to remain virgins. Atrahasis himself is carried away to paradise to live apart from these new human beings whom Nintu then creates.

The story would have served, besides simply as entertainment, to explain human mortality, those misfortunes attendant on childbirth, even the death of one's child. Since overpopulation and the resultant noise had once brought down the terrible deluge which almost destroyed humanity, the loss of one's child could, perhaps, be more easily borne with the knowledge that such a loss helped to preserve the natural order of things and kept peace with the gods. The myth would have served the same basic purpose which such stories always have: the assurance that individual human suffering has some greater purpose or meaning and is not simply random, senseless pain. The Atrahasis, like the story of Noah's Ark, is finally a tale of hope and of faith in a deeper meaning to the tragedies of the human experience.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
If you look to actual science like geology and not apologetics bro-science there are times when sea level rises due to glacial shifts but:

"The scientific version of Noah's flood actually starts long before that, back during the last great glaciation some 20,000 years ago."
Evidence for a Flood | Science | Smithsonian


and

Young-Earth creationists claim that the Paleozoic sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon and the Mesozoic sedimentary rocks of the Grand Staircase north of the canyon, in which Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks occur, were deposited during Noah’s worldwide flood about 4,500 years ago (Hill 2002; Hill and Moshier 2009). I realize that readers of Skeptical Inquirer accept modern scientific views on this subject, but this examination of the creationist claims might be useful when communicating with others less imbued with scientific thinking.

There are at least twenty-one scientific reasons a worldwide flood recounted in the Bible cannot have happened.

  1. The stair-stepped appearance of erosion of sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon with sandstones and limestones forming cliffs and shales forming gentle slopes cannot happen if all these rocks were deposited in less than one year. If the Grand Canyon had been carved soon after these rocks were deposited by a worldwide flood, they would not have had time to harden into solid rock and would have been saturated with water. Therefore, the sandstones and limestones would have slumped during the carving of the canyon and would not have formed cliffs (Hill et al. 2016).
  2. Salt and gypsum deposits, more than 200 feet thick, occur in the Paradox Formation in Utah just 200 miles north of the Grand Canyon, and these deposits are the same age as the Supai rocks in the Grand Canyon that were supposedly also deposited by Noah’s flood. Similar salt deposits, up to 3,000 feet thick, exist in various places on all continents and in layers of all geologic ages, and these deposits can only be produced by evaporation of sea water. Such evaporation could not have happened in repeated intervals in the midst of the forty days and forty nights of raining and during the supposed continuous deposition of sedimentary rocks by a worldwide flood and in which the only drying and evaporation is said to have occurred at the end of the flood (Collins 2006; 2009; 2012; Hill et al. 2016).
  3. Sand dunes with giant cross bedding occur in the Mesozoic rocks in Zion National Park and are further evidence that desert conditions occurred at the time of the supposed flood (Senter 2011; Collins 2017).
  4. and lay their eggs while they were fleeing from rising waters to reach higher ground (Senter 2011; Hill et al. 2016).
19 more reasons at:
"Twenty-One Reasons Noah’s Worldwide Flood Never Happened - CSI




while it's possible there was a local flood the mythology contains all of the mythical narratives and hidden meaning that all of the other stories of floods contain. The story has inner meaning which I just learned doing research on it:

The Atrahasis Epic: The Great Flood & the Meaning of Suffering
The Atrahasis is the Akkadian/Babylonian epic of the Great Flood sent by the gods to destroy human life. Only the good man, Atrahasis (his name translates as `exceedingly wise') was warned of the impending deluge by the god Ea who instructed him to build an ark to save himself. Atrahasis heeded the words of the god, loaded two of every kind of animal into the ark, and so preserved human and animal life on earth.

Written down in the mid-17th century BCE, the Atrahasis can be dated by the colophon to the reign of the Babylonian King Hammurabi's great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646-1626 BCE) though the tale itself is considered much older, passed down through oral transmission. The Sumerian Flood Story (known as the `Eridu Genesis') which tells the same story, is certainly older (written down early 17th century BCE) and Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which also relates the tale of the Great Flood, is even older than that (2150-1400 BCE, though this is the date of the writing of Gilgamesh and it may well be that the Sumerian Flood story, in oral form, is actually older). While the story itself concerns a flood of universal proportions (even scaring the gods who unleashed it) most scholars recognize that it was probably inspired by a local event: flooding caused by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowing their banks.

While archaeological and geological evidence has shown such flooding was a fairly common occurrence, it is speculated that a particularly memorable flood served as the basis for the story. No recognized scholar working in the present day maintains the argument that there was ever a world-wide flood such as Atrahasis and the other accounts depict (including the story of Noah and his Ark in the Biblical book of Genesis). The Mesopotamian scholar Stephanie Dalley writes, "No flood deposits are found in third-millennium strata, and Archbishop Usher's date for the Flood of 2349 BC, which was calculated by using numbers in Genesis at face value...is now out of the question."

The Atrahasis begins after the creation of the world but before the appearance of human beings:
At first the gods enjoy the leisure the human workers afford them but, in time, the people become too loud and disturb the gods's rest. Enlil, the king of the gods, is especially annoyed by the constant disturbance from below and so decides to lessen the population by sending first a drought, then pestilence and then famine down upon the earth. After each of these plagues, the humans appeal to the god who first conceived of them, Enki, and he tells them what to do to end their suffering and return the earth to a natural, productive state. Enlil, finally, can stand no more and persuades the other gods to join him in sending a devastating flood to earth which will completely wipe out the human beings. Enki takes pity on his servant, the kind and wise Atrahasis, and warns him of the coming flood, telling him to build an ark and to seal two of every kind of animal within. Atrahasis does as he is commanded and the deluge begins:
The mother goddess, Nintu, weeps for the destruction of her children ("she was sated with grief, she longed for beer in vain") and the other gods weep with her.

After the waters subside Enlil and the other gods realize their mistake and regret what they have done; yet feel there is no way they can un-do it. At this point Atrahasis comes out of his ark and makes a sacrifice to the gods. Enlil, though only just before wishing he had not destroyed humanity, is now furious at Enki for allowing any one to escape alive. Enki explains himself to the assembly, the gods descend to eat of Atrahasis' sacrifice, and Enki then proposes a new solution to the problem of human overpopulation: create new creatures who will not be as fertile as the last. From now on, it is declared, there will be women who cannot bear children, demons who will snatch infants away and cause miscarriages, and women consecrated to the gods who will have to remain virgins. Atrahasis himself is carried away to paradise to live apart from these new human beings whom Nintu then creates.

The story would have served, besides simply as entertainment, to explain human mortality, those misfortunes attendant on childbirth, even the death of one's child. Since overpopulation and the resultant noise had once brought down the terrible deluge which almost destroyed humanity, the loss of one's child could, perhaps, be more easily borne with the knowledge that such a loss helped to preserve the natural order of things and kept peace with the gods. The myth would have served the same basic purpose which such stories always have: the assurance that individual human suffering has some greater purpose or meaning and is not simply random, senseless pain. The Atrahasis, like the story of Noah's Ark, is finally a tale of hope and of faith in a deeper meaning to the tragedies of the human experience.
One of my favorite arguments for years is a variation of one cited by you. A tributary to the Grand Canyon shows a structure that cannot be explained by flood geology:

600px-2009-08-20-01800_USA_Utah_316_Goosenecks_SP.jpg



The Goosenecks state park has beautiful incised meanders that refute the claim that the Grand Canyon is a flood feature.

Goosenecks State Park - Wikipedia
 
Last edited:

sooda

Veteran Member
Sorry, I disagree with you, I think we have vast amount of evidence. I can’t deny the existence of the evidence.

There is NO evidence for a global flood.. and there are no "fountains of the deep"... You have mountain snowmelt and rain.
 

sooda

Veteran Member
Yes, I don’t believe Biblical flood story is copied to Bible from "older cultures" and I believe the flood really happened and we have lot of evidence for the flood.

Well the story was on clay tablets in Bahrain a thousand years before Genesis.

It wasn't the Black Sea breech either.. that was a very slow moving "flood" .. They had plenty of time.. weeks and months to move their families and livestock to higher ground.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
One of my favorite arguments for years is a variation of one cited by you. A tributary to the Grand Canyon shows a structure that cannot be explained by flood geolgy:

Goosenecks_State_Park


Rats! Need to edit that when I get home. The Goosenecks state park has beautiful incised meanders that refute the claim that the Grand Canyon is a flood feature.

Goosenecks State Park - Wikipedia

That's yet another example to add to the list.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
That's yet another example to add to the list.
Edited that post.

Please note the meander. Those do not form in flood waters. They form in relatively flat areas over a period of time. as part of a regular sustained flow. They are the product of relatively slow moving water, such as the lower reaches of the Mississippi. It could not have formed during the flood. It would have had to form after it. But then we quickly run into problems. It is an incised meander They form when either sea level drops, or there is an increase in elevation. We know that the area is uplifted. But even if one wanted to try to claim that it reflects the flood water drop that will not work. First it would take years to form. Second once formed it has to erode its way down. This is not the work of just a few thousands of years of erosion. This would have formed well after all of the flood water drained off and the flow was steady. Large flows would simply rise the level of the stream in the newly formed meander and it would cut across. We can see that in the Southern Mississippi when it floods. Obviously we had a meander form without serious later floods. Next it is the product of normal erosion which is rather slow paced. The rocks had to be well indurated (cemented together). The steepness of the slopes, which are at times sheer cliffs tell us that.. One can observe this on freeways at times. Where a cut is made into a large hil of soil the banks have to have a rather gentle slope. Otherwise they would slump onto the freeway in wet seasons. But if one goes through solid rock one can have almost vertical walls. Exalty what we see here. At the current rate of erosion this could not have been done in a geologically short period of time in solid rock.

But it was nice to see that others use the same argument that I do.
 

1213

Well-Known Member
...though the tale itself is considered much older, passed down through oral transmission. ...

It is interesting how in that there is no difficult to believe in oral tradition, but in the case of the Bible, the story begins from the oldest found scriptures as if it would not have first been told orally.
 

sooda

Veteran Member
Yes, I don’t believe Biblical flood story is copied to Bible from "older cultures" and I believe the flood really happened and we have lot of evidence for the flood.

There's no evidence for a global flood. Its a children's story.
 

sooda

Veteran Member
It is interesting how in that there is no difficult to believe in oral tradition, but in the case of the Bible, the story begins from the oldest found scriptures as if it would not have first been told orally.

The Gilgamesh myth was written down 2000 years before Genesis in Dilmun and Babylon on clay tablets.The Hebrews learned the story during the Babylonian exile.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
It is interesting that even though there are so many stories, people don’t believe.

It isn't interesting because the scientific evidence shows there was no worldwide flood. Y'know, the evidence we've been posting?
But the fact that there are so many flood myths going back to Africa means it a myth that is copied into each new culture.
Fairies and monsters in the forest is another myth going back to the beginning, does that mean there must be all sorts of supernatural creatures running around in the forest?

People like to say the bible is true BECUASE it's content is original, not because the same myths run through cultures since the beginning of man?
Once people realize the myths are just cultural and not actually original to religious scripture they realize they are stories that are not literal but are metaphorical tales. I suppose some people will just never get it?

For the next several thousand years humans will probably have the myths of a man who wears tights and a cape and can fly and has super strength and laser eye beams. There have already been at least 10 versions since Superman and there will forever be more.
It doesn't mean these people were ever real?
I don't think the church even considers OT stories to be literal anymore?
 
Top