Dear Christians: What does your god actually do?

[Whateverist]

Translation:  People who believe already do so before anything is explained or understood.  Those who don't believe are not impressed with any of the rationalizations given for unexplained belief.

You're absolutely right. It's a mater of TRUST. Trust vs. no trust is completely irrational. Mostly mediated by oxytocin at the level of the more "primitive" parts of the brain. Not the logical part at all.

By the way, women tend to be less trusting than men, initially. Are you a woman?

Trust plays a crucial part of many kinds of human interactions.  No doubt.  When you're raised in a religion, it tends to lead you to knit justifications for those religious beliefs.  

But once you're out, no longer believe any of that stuff, you lose the propensity to justify the beliefs you raised with.  Then it seems strange that people would believe those things and their justifications look as useless as they actually are.

I'm not a woman but I sure like them.

[Godscreated]

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 Surely you can't mean you do not understand what I was saying, let's go at it again. God gave man the permission to eat meat of some animals that were on the Ark. Man also eat vegetation, there were probably many nuts laying around, nuts will last for years. As far as eight people eating up the animals they were allowed to eat, why do you think God told them there would be seven pairs of those animals. Many animals reproduce at quite a good rate, and fish would have been abundant, not just for man but also for the animals who would need meat to eat along with vegetation. Many animals that eat meat also eat vegetation, seaweeds would have be in great supply, seaweed is a great source of food. Milk from sheep and goats would have supplied a great source of nutrition. There would have been fourteen supplying milk, eggs from birds like chickens would have supplied more eggs than they could eat and still have plenty of chicks, in a years time there would have been hundreds of chickens alone to eat and lay eggs which would have supplied most of there food needs until other animals had a chance to grow their populations. Chickens start laying eggs within six months of hatching. I have three chicken I got as chicks back in the spring, they are now laying more eggs than I and my pup can eat and these are not even a huge eggs producing breed. I have three others that very good producers and there are days those three will lay as many as nine eggs a day, what do you think fourteen would produce and in six months an abundance of chicks will have grown up and started laying. There would have been plenty for the people and some of the animals. Need I continue, sheep, goats and chickens would have supplied the eight with plenty until a good recovery was under way, plus the vegetation they would have, seems to me they would have eaten quite well.

GC

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Somehow I doubt they ate better than the Egyptians, the Chinese, the early inhabitants of the Americas, or any of the other civilizations that seem not to have noticed the worldwide flood. Why are you so wedded to this particular story? There are Christians who don't think there was literally a worldwide flood, yet they continue to believe in Christ resurrected. If you were to acknowledge that it is a myth or a legend of a particular people of a particular time and place, would that invalidate your faith or cause you to consider the Bible, as a whole, suspect?

I'm not trying to play gotcha. I mean that as a serious question.

 This is what I believe, if any one thing is not true in the scriptures how am I to trust any other part. If the flood is false then how do I know that Christ isn't false. It has to be true from the beginning to the end, if any part is false then how do I determine what is real, or how could you. People who start reading the Bible and come to the conclusion that this part or that part isn't true, then they put doubt into the equation before they can find the truth through God, in other words a person stifles the Holy Spirit's conviction without being able to be lead to the truth. Why people do this is beyond me, it's like telling your math teacher he/she doesn't know what they are teaching simply because when the student first encounters the math they do not understand it so they reject it.
 You know I didn't say they were eating a king's meal, what I did do, was point out it was very possible for Noah and his family and the next generation or two to easily survive and not cause any extinction of any animal before the world could recover from the flood. I did this with only three animals and some vegetation, there are more possibilities to go with what I proposed, viable ones.

GC

[Crossless2.0]

Somehow I doubt they ate better than the Egyptians, the Chinese, the early inhabitants of the Americas, or any of the other civilizations that seem not to have noticed the worldwide flood. Why are you so wedded to this particular story? There are Christians who don't think there was literally a worldwide flood, yet they continue to believe in Christ resurrected. If you were to acknowledge that it is a myth or a legend of a particular people of a particular time and place, would that invalidate your faith or cause you to consider the Bible, as a whole, suspect?

I'm not trying to play gotcha. I mean that as a serious question.

 This is what I believe, if any one thing is not true in the scriptures how am I to trust any other part. If the flood is false then how do I know that Christ isn't false. It has to be true from the beginning to the end, if any part is false then how do I determine what is real, or how could you. People who start reading the Bible and come to the conclusion that this part or that part isn't true, then they put doubt into the equation before they can find the truth through God, in other words a person stifles the Holy Spirit's conviction without being able to be lead to the truth. Why people do this is beyond me, it's like telling your math teacher he/she doesn't know what they are teaching simply because when the student first encounters the math they do not understand it so they reject it.
 You know I didn't say they were eating a king's meal, what I did do, was point out it was very possible for Noah and his family and the next generation or two to easily survive and not cause any extinction of any animal before the world could recover from the flood. I did this with only three animals and some vegetation, there are more possibilities to go with what I proposed, viable ones.

GC

That being the case, and given the utter lack of evidence for a global flood as described in Genesis, why then are you still a Christian? Mind you, I'm not saying that people who don't accept a literal account of the flood story must give up their Christian faith on that basis, but you have pretty much put it in those terms for yourself.

And the math analogy is a non-starter. The student can learn the proofs necessary to understand why the teacher is correct, and it doesn't depend on accepting anything on faith but on a step-by-step process of reasoning. You've decided, on faith alone, that the flood must have happened because otherwise the "teacher", i.e., the Bible, is untrustworthy. And in the process, you've ignored the possibility that the Bible could convey "truths" through non-literal means.

*Feeling a bit odd defending the Bible to a Baptist*  

Edited to add: my point about the Chinese, Egyptians, etc. (which I thought was clear enough) is that they were there precisely at the time when all of humanity except the inhabitants of the Ark were supposedly wiped out by a worldwide flood, according to a literal reading of the OT and the genealogies therein. We have compelling reasons to believe in the existence of these ancient peoples and not one shred of good evidence for a worldwide flood. Not one, despite the insane ramblings and distorted reasoning of the folks at AIG and other groups committed to salvaging a literal reading of the Bible at all costs -- the foremost costs being their rationality and simple honesty.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

 This is what I believe, if any one thing is not true in the scriptures how am I to trust any other part. If the flood is false then how do I know that Christ isn't false. It has to be true from the beginning to the end, if any part is false then how do I determine what is real, or how could you. People who start reading the Bible and come to the conclusion that this part or that part isn't true, then they put doubt into the equation before they can find the truth through God, in other words a person stifles the Holy Spirit's conviction without being able to be lead to the truth. Why people do this is beyond me, it's like telling your math teacher he/she doesn't know what they are teaching simply because when the student first encounters the math they do not understand it so they reject it.
 You know I didn't say they were eating a king's meal, what I did do, was point out it was very possible for Noah and his family and the next generation or two to easily survive and not cause any extinction of any animal before the world could recover from the flood. I did this with only three animals and some vegetation, there are more possibilities to go with what I proposed, viable ones.

GC

The story is a good one, for its time and place, and the knowledge (and also lack thereof) that the authors had, but there are two main problems with it.

One, it's pretty clearly borrowed (and no I don't mean copied, I mean borrowed, as in they took pieces from it and made their own version of the story) in large part from the legend of Ut-napishtim, a Sumerian myth which was forgotten for centuries by western civilization until the discovery of tablets that told the story, in the mid-1800s, in Ur of Chaldea (you may recall this as the hometown of Abraham). The stories vary widely in places, but they contain a few critical elements that show that the Hebrew version is a rehash of the old tale:

[*] The gods get together and decide that mankind must be punished for his wickedness.
[*] God chooses a righteous man to save the animals by building a boat (in the original, it was more of a multilayered square raft).
[*] God warns Ut-napishtim that the flood is coming, and tells him to build the boat, etc., and the boat is built with one door and a window.
[*] Pairs of animals were taken aboard this raft, while everything else was flooded and wiped out/killed.
[*] Rain fell until it covered the mountains (though in The Epic of Gilgamesh, it only falls for a week).
[*] After a time on the flooded waters, birds are sent out to see if they can find dry land-- where the Bible has Noah sending out a raven (failure) followed by doves, who succeed, the Epic of Gilgamesh has Ut-napishtim sending out a dove and a swallow that fail, followed by a raven, who succeeds. No symbolism there!
[*] The raft came to settle on the top of a mountain (Mount Nisir, about 300 miles away from Mt. Ararat).
[*] Ut-napishtim offered sacrifices to the gods, upon getting out of his boat, which pleased them and they offered blessings that included a promise never to flood the world again.

Now, the traditional way to view this finding, for evangelicals, has been to say that the Sumerians (a mighty empire, in its day) borrowed their tales from badly-remembered history, while the ancestors of the Hebrews remembered the story correctly, and recorded it accurately.

The more obvious explanation is that the ancestors of the Hebrews came from Ur, and brought the tales of 900-year-lifespan God-Kings (which became the 900-year-lifespan Patriarchs), as well as the story of the great flood of Ea, which became the tale of Noah.

If you could let go of your mythology for a bit, you'd see it's not about approaching the issue with doubt that clouds the issue, but approaching it as if it must be true-as-written. The sheer thermodynamics of that much rain are mind-boggling, from the rate at which the rain must have fallen (in inches per hour) to the thermal effects of that much condensation in the atmosphere, if you want to really look at an issue with the story that doesn't involve feeding animals or how a 450+ foot long wooden boat managed to survive for a year when the best architects of wooden ships at the beginning of the 20th century couldn't build a 350 foot long wooden boat that survived (it immediately had problems with flooding, needed a steam engine to keep its holds pumped dry, and wound up foundering after 15 years of operation, 1909-1924), even with steel reinforcement. In other words, your Ark could not have floated successfully, bearing the kind of loads you're talking about, and would have foundered and sank as soon as it hit its first waves in the massive storm that caused the flood... there are about a dozen other major reasons the Ark is physically impossible...

It's. A. Myth!

[Crossless2.0]

Go ahead, Rocket. Ask him to supply a stowage plan and stability calculations for Noah's cargo. I've posed the question to him and others on a number of occasions. Oddly, no one wants to do the fucking math.

[drfuzzy]

There was a flood.  Actually, there were a lot of floods in southern Mesopotamia approx. 3500 - 2800 BCE.  Archeologists find flood strata at Ur and Kish and Shurrupak.  It's widely accepted that these floods were the most likely origin for the Ut-napashtim story.  They were pretty massive - they weren't global, that's not even possible by the planet's own ecology - but they put a good chunk of land underwater.  Any trader, carrying family and livestock on the Tigris or Euphrates rivers could have floated around for quite a while - - possibly even lost in the Persian Gulf.  

I don't believe the bible is a credible historical document.  But I do like the thought that some of these old fables probably had a basis in fact.  
Who knows?  There could even have been an Exodus.   A small group of Hebrews in Egypt could have pissed off their neighbors, and packed up their toys and left. They got lost and forgot which way was north for a while.  Or something.  And the tale gets told generation after generation, and the next thing you know they're being led by a minor Egyptian prince who was born a Hebrew (which actually started as the birth story of Horus) and their God was a pillar of fire who parted the sea and killed the Egyptian army and . . . yeah.  Stories get embellished. 

It's kind of like the difference between Santa Claus and St. Nicolaus.

[Crossless2.0]

There was a flood.  Actually, there were a lot of floods in southern Mesopotamia approx. 3500 - 2800 BCE.  Archeologists find flood strata at Ur and Kish and Shurrupak.  It's widely accepted that these floods were the most likely origin for the Ut-napashtim story.  They were pretty massive - they weren't global, that's not even possible by the planet's own ecology - but they put a good chunk of land underwater.  Any trader, carrying family and livestock on the Tigris or Euphrates rivers could have floated around for quite a while - - possibly even lost in the Persian Gulf.  

I don't believe the bible is a credible historical document.  But I do like the thought that some of these old fables probably had a basis in fact.  
Who knows?  There could even have been an Exodus.   A small group of Hebrews in Egypt could have pissed off their neighbors, and packed up their toys and left. They got lost and forgot which way was north for a while.  Or something.  And the tale gets told generation after generation, and the next thing you know they're being led by a minor Egyptian prince who was born a Hebrew (which actually started as the birth story of Horus) and their God was a pillar of fire who parted the sea and killed the Egyptian army and . . . yeah.  Stories get embellished. 

It's kind of like the difference between Santa Claus and St. Nicolaus.

Sure. And no reader not absolutely committed to the idea that the Bible is a completely accurate historical document would have any problem with what you've written. I'm just hoping to get GC or any other Biblical literalist reading this thread to simply acknowledge that their approach to the Bible is untenable and can't stand up to rational scrutiny. Hell, I don't even really care if he or others remain Christian. I'd just like them to abandon the ridiculous assumption that the Bible is 100% factually accurate as it's written.

The Noah story a memory and retelling of a devastating regional flood (or series of such floods)? I don't doubt it for a moment.

[drfuzzy]

Sorry Crossless!  Didn't mean to derail your ark stowage and stability challenge.        
That's a good puzzle.

[Crossless2.0]

Sorry Crossless!  Didn't mean to derail your ark stowage and stability challenge.        
That's a good puzzle.

No problem. It's not like any of them will ever try to answer it.

Besides, it's not answerable because the craft wouldn't have been seaworthy to begin with.

[Godscreated]

That being the case, and given the utter lack of evidence for a global flood as described in Genesis, why then are you still a Christian? Mind you, I'm not saying that people who don't accept a literal account of the flood story must give up their Christian faith on that basis, but you have pretty much put it in those terms for yourself.

First of all there are flood stories from all over the world, even from peoples who wouldn't have had communication with each other, second there is evidence of great flooding all over the world, I know there are places where this evidence doesn't appear. So you see there isn't enough evidence against the flood story to dismiss it. As for the scientist at AIG, some were former atheist and they are good scientist with a different view.

And the math analogy is a non-starter. The student can learn the proofs necessary to understand why the teacher is correct, and it doesn't depend on accepting anything on faith but on a step-by-step process of reasoning. You've decided, on faith alone, that the flood must have happened because otherwise the "teacher", i.e., the Bible, is untrustworthy. And in the process, you've ignored the possibility that the Bible could convey "truths" through non-literal means.

  There's nothing that compares well between the spiritual and physical world. However if a student was rejecting what the math books are saying because he didn't understand what he was reading and was stubborn about his belief he would be stifling the teachers efforts. Let me say this God has taken me to an assurance that He and the Bible are both very real and very trustworthy. 

*Feeling a bit odd defending the Bible to a Baptist*  

I'm not sure how you see you're defending the Bible when you call it non-literal, the prophecies and some parables can't be taken as literal events.

Edited to add: my point about the Chinese, Egyptians, etc. (which I thought was clear enough) is that they were there precisely at the time when all of humanity except the inhabitants of the Ark were supposedly wiped out by a worldwide flood, according to a literal reading of the OT and the genealogies therein. We have compelling reasons to believe in the existence of these ancient peoples and not one shred of good evidence for a worldwide flood. Not one, despite the insane ramblings and distorted reasoning of the folks at AIG and other groups committed to salvaging a literal reading of the Bible at all costs -- the foremost costs being their rationality and simple honesty.

There is controversy about the dating of these civilizations, not only between secular scientist and creation scientist, but also between secular scientist, or archaeologist if you prefer.

GC