The Great Flood

[Daystar]

The bible says quite clearly 6 (SIX) days with God resting on the 7th (SEVENTH) ... it does not say 6 periods that many or may not be 24 hours in length and may be reinterpreted according to the personal wishes/biases of the person reading it, it says DAYS! Anything else is a personal interpretation of yours and not backed up by the available evidence.

I will repeat this for those who have not had the opportunity to consider it before. The Bible uses the Hebrew word yohm which is translated as day. In the Genesis account of creation that word is used in three different ways - all three of these are used in modern English so there is nothing misleading about the translation or the use - the confusion is derived from the fact that the misunderstanding about the period of time being a literal 24 hours is what you are accustomed to rejecting and the best you can do is dismiss any new information as interpretation. Lazy stubbornness.

The term day (Hebrew yohm) means any given period of time within a narrative so if the creation account says that a day is the daylight hours that is correct, when it says a day is the day and night hours a 24 hour period that is also correct, when it uses the entire 6 creative periods as one day that is correct just as it is used today. My grandfather’s day wasn't only one literal 24 hour period.

The fact that the seventh day was still in process thousands of years later would confirm that the Bible didn't imply that these were 24 hour periods. The term yohm is often applied in a similar manner as periods lasting anywhere from hours to thousands of years depending upon the context.

The upshot of this is that the Bible doesn't disagree with science on the age of the universe of about 4.5 billion years. That pisses some people off because they want to believe what they want to believe but it really isn't a question of science or religion it is a question of linguistics.

CPR my arse! It reads as magic!

What is an arse? I have always wondered what an arse is and why people use that term rather than ass. Bottom. Buttocks. Anyway ...

2 Kings 4:32 - 34 - At last Elisha came into the house, and there the boy was dead, being laid upon his couch. Then he came in and closed the door behind them both and began to pray to Jehovah. Finally he went up and lay down upon the child and put his own mouth upon his mouth and his own eyes upon his eyes and his own palms upon his palms and kept bent over him, and gradually the child’s flesh grew warm.

Yawn! I couldn't care less, they read as magic and as such cannot be considered to be in line with modern scientific thought.

Yes and that is so original. I think that is what the church used to say about Galileo's "Letters on Sunspots" in 1613. You don't see the similarities in the ignorant myopic emotional fixation of modern day science minded attempts to limit knowledge as the same?

Consider Astronomer Robert Jastrow, an agnostic in religious matters, who wrote: "The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy."

Armchair science is an excuse for a blinding rage, not much else.

Nothing stays at the scientific table UNLESS it is supported by validatable evidence ... these claims have no supporting validatable evidence and therefore can be discarded as non-scientific.

Uh-huh.

Well that's ... just ... bullsh1t isn't it? The fact is that the bible has both talking animals and plants in it and your reinterpretations of those stories are just weak-arsed attempts to retro fit your belief system into science and, sorry 'n all that, but it doesn't work!!!

Listen to that rage! You would think that your science could come up with a somewhat more scholarly criticism.

No it just shows the scientific ignorance of the writers of that age ... current day poetic expressions of the same kind derive from such biblical lunacy for the same reason that many think the heart is the centre of emotion (it isn't, it's a pump, nothing more) ... in fact I'll post another post on this subject by a friend and e-zine contributor of mine.

The term is used the same today. Get over it. The heart is the central organ of the body and is used figuratively as the heart of things like "the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40), "the heart of the sea" (Exodus 15:8 / John 2:3), and "the heart of the big tree" (2 Samuel 18:14), and "midheaven" literally means "the heart of the heavens." (Deuteronomy 4:11)

Again I couldn't actually care less about your weak attempts to reinterpret and retrofit the words of the bible into science, the fact is that it refers to the sky as a dome (it isn't) and it says there are windows in it that let the rain come through.

I don't give a rat's ass more about science than you do the Bible and your weak ass defense of your own religion (science) is a great deal more pathetic than mine of the Bible. You might want to think about that. Almost everything I have ever heard any Atheist say about the Bible, blowing the horn of science as a defense, was flat out wrong and based upon an irrational hatred and ignorance and they haven't even begin to scratch the surface. They have said next to nothing on the dietary and sanitary regulations or the hydrologic cycle! If we use the Pythagoras as a point of reference Job was about 1000 years ahead of science. Its a joke.

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Some of the most outlandish lessons in anatomy and physiology are contained in the Bible. We are told that bats are birds, that there are insects that have only 4 legs, and that rabbits chew their cud. Well, let's take a look at what the Bible says about human anatomy.

Bats And Birds

Leviticus 11:13 - 20 And these are what you will loathe among the flying creatures. They should not be eaten. They are a loathsome thing: the eagle and the osprey and the black vulture, and the red kite and the black kite according to its kind, and every raven according to its kind, and the ostrich and the owl and the gull and the falcon according to its kind, and the little owl and the cormorant and the long-eared owl, and the swan and the pelican and the vulture, and the stork, the heron according to its kind, and the hoopoe and the bat.

Insects On Four Legs.

Moses referred to insects as walking 'on all fours,' since we the Bible lists insects as edible it is logical to assume that the Bible writers, including Moses, who wrote the law regarding this knew that they had six legs. When he wrote that insects walked on four legs he might have been referring to bees, flies, and wasps that walk on six legs like four legged creatures or more likely, specific references to insects with leaper legs that actually do walk on all four legs like the locust.

Leviticus 11:20 - 23 - Only this is what you may eat of all the winged swarming creatures that go upon all fours, those that have leaper legs above their feet with which to leap upon the earth. These are the ones of them you may eat of: the migratory locust according to its kind, and the edible locust after its kind, and the cricket according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind. And every other winged swarming creature that does have four legs is a loathsome thing to you.

Rabbits That Chew Their Cud

The Hebrew term translated "chewing" literally means "bringing up." The Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1940, Vol. 110, pp. 159-163, Dr. Waldo L. Schmitt, Head Curator, Department of Zoology of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, Ivan T. Sanderson, in Living Mammals of the World, 1955, p. 114 all agree that rabbits do in fact chew their cud.

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You follow it? What, like down the road?

Frankly, given some of the things you've said here, I think you can only make that statement because you think it's OK to reinterpret just about everything in it and the interesting thing about that position is that, by such reinterpretation, you admit you do not like or believe exactly what the words say and that the only difference between you and me is a matter of degree ... you disbelieve some aspects of it and interpret your way out of the bits or senses you don't like, I disbelieve pretty much all of it (apart from recognising it cautiously as an historical source).

No, I follow it like I know what I am talking about and can discuss it as such which is the only real differance between you and me.