The Flood
If you are a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim,
you have a story in your Bronze Age texts about a Great Flood.
This is the rational perspective on that event. You may have learnt a different viewpoint when you were first taught it - probably as a young child.
First, here is a paragraph to read
Your daughter is a beautiful 4 year old, with lovely blonde curls. Occasionally, though, she can be disobedient, thoughtless or bad-mannered - like all children.
Imagine the following situation: One day you come home from nursery and decide "I have had enough". You roughly take her upstairs to the bathroom, you fill the bath with cold water. You lift her bodily and plunge her into the water. She struggles and cries, but you hold her head under the water. You put your foot on her neck and she writhes in an agony of suffocating torment. She chokes and inhales water. You watch as she convulses, as her face turns gradually pale and bluish. you watch as her body becomes lifeless. You throw her corpse out on the front lawn to rot.
Then you calmly write a newspaper article about this, announcing that you did it because she was disobedient. You also casually promise that you will never kill her small brother, at least not by drowning him. Fortunately you already have a reputation in the town for being a "good man". No-one criticises you or calls the police.
In the Biblical Flood Story, God takes full credit for the mass murder of everyone on the planet (except Noah's family) and the destruction of every animal on the planet (except for those chosen pairs). He drowns the lot.
Let's explore this, shall we?
"Every living thing". (Gen 7:23) That means every man. Every woman. Every teen-aged child. Every young child. Every toddler. Every innocent baby boy and every smiling baby girl. Every single unborn embryo. Every elderly, infirm grandparent. Every disabled person. Every one of them, writhing and drowning, struggling and suffocating as cold dirty water filled their agonised lungs. Every animal destroyed, pets and all.
The God whom Christians, Jews and Muslims worship, your god, did that.
Then, in Gen 9:15, he had the goodness to promise never to murder everyone on the planet again, in that particular way!! He put a pretty rainbow in the sky. Does that reassure you? Do you think it reassures the families of those killed in the 2004 tsunami, or the Mozambique floods, or the 500,000 killed in the Bangladeshi floods? "Oh well, at least it was only half a million that died this time - not the entire human race!"
Supernaturalists (Christians, Jews and
Muslims) continue to teach their children to bow down to this murderous,
genocidal tyrant.
________
So, faced with this, what do religious people say?
a) It's only a metaphor - it didn't really happen.
or: b) God has the right to murder because He's God, the creator of all those people and animals.
or: c) There was a local (not global) flood and the Bible includes the myths that grew up around it.
So, a) do you think it was only a metaphor? If yes, then you have a problem, because the metaphors just go on and on. The genocides carried out by God in the Bible are numerous. You end up by describing the whole Bronze Age book (the Old Testament) as a metaphor. And then, naturally, the whole Iron Age book (the New Testament) is a metaphor too. Jesus didn't really start walking around again after he'd been brain-dead. No - it's a metaphor. Is this God's word or not? Is it true or not? Anyway, what is it a metaphor for? What is its point? What does this horrid story teach us?
Or, b) do you think God had the right to murder all those people? We could test this out in a court, perhaps. The nearest analogy would be my story, above. Would I have the right to drown my own daughter, because she was disobedient? I had a hand in her creation, after all. Does a big, strong person have the right to murder any weaker individual, even if they made them out of dust? Does might make right?
Any right-minded person would describe the wholesale murder of everyone on the planet as NOT particularly good behaviour. So religious people worship god not because he is good, but because he is powerful.
Do you agree with c) above? Me too.
In fact, the flood myths are widespread because all floods are traumatic events and stories about them would always be passed down the generations and grow in the telling. All of the first 11 chapters of Genesis are directly linked back to Mesopotamian mythology. Scholars know and agree on this - but you don't hear it from the pulpit. The word "Mesopotamia" means "between rivers". It was a land frequented by catastrophic floods.
A god was blamed, because people didn't understand natural phenomena and they already had beliefs in spirits causing all sorts of good and bad things like rain and lightning.
To summarise:- we don't have to blame a god for this flood. He wasn't a nasty, genocidal tyrant after all. Instead he was imaginary.
Post script: Notice I didn't bother going into all the absurdities of a boat made of gopher wood that would have collapsed under the stresses of its own size and weight given its described dimensions. Or the rainbow that forms anywhere you have diffraction of light through precipitation - anywhere including other planets. Did God wipe out their inhabitants too and make similar promises? This whole myth could have been concocted by a Bronze Age parent trying to explain the origin of the rainbow to a curious child.
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