Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 27, 2013

Why would Noah have lost ALL the dinosaurs? Seems he might have saved a pterodactyl or two.

Yes… Yes… This is a fertile land and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land and we will call it… This Land.

If you need an (almost) clear slate, postulate a singularity; from there, you can go (almost) anywhere!

The Greeks had flood myths too.

The Unicorns were fine – ‘unicorn horns’ produced by travellers to amaze the gullible of former times were narwhal tusks.

>Why would Noah have lost ALL the dinosaurs? Seems he might have saved a pterodactyl or two.

Pterodactyls aren’t strictly speaking dinosaurs…but the flood myth doesn’t explain the demise of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Noah wouldn’t have had to save them. And no, sadly there are none lurking in Loch Ness.

This thread is sounding amazingly like a Republican debate.

From William Falkner, “The Reivers”

A Republican is a man who made his money, a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race, a Conservative is a Republican who has leared to read and write.

The direct descendants of dinosaurs are all around us, and there were quite a few on the legendary Ark. They are called “birds”.

Birds? Ah, yes, but you have to believe in evolution to get from dinosaurs to birds!

As with most myths, there is usually a grain of truth in the story.

About 5 millions years ago, (a bit before Noah’s or the Babylonian’s time), the Mediterranean “Sea” was a desiccated basin cut off from the Atlantic by a land bridge across the Gibraltar strait. Then the Zanclean mega flood occurred which filled the basin in a very short time: estimates run from two months to two years. It was caused by a breach in the land bridge which rapidly eroded the dam and resulted in flow rates of up to 100 million cubic meters per second and sea level rises of up to 30 meters per day.

10^8 m^3 is a mind boggling quantity. It is about one third of a cubic kilometer or a volume equal to eleven football fields on a side by one tall. Per second!

IIRC, I think I calculated that the flow rates reached 150 km/hr (90 mph). That would be one hunkin’ rafting trip!

Hmmm. Although this is an interesting and fun bit of info, and might seem a basis for the flood myth, there is one minor little problem: humans (or pre-humans, ~Neanderthals), didn’t exist until about 300,000 years ago. Oh well, it was a good exercise in refreshing my memory. Enjoy it anyway.

Zanclean flood references: BBC Newsand Wikipedia

ah that old time religion, way to control the masses and get them to kill for you.

American’s right to be stupid. now that is a right the Right proudly displays and pushes for all of us to be. and thanks be to God the Republican St. Reagan, we are all blessed with teh fruits thereof. encouraging Stupidity, Hatred and Fascism/Feudalism. the Republican Way!

ah to be a Republican! dumb, stupid and led to the slaughter. and watch the Democrats follow, eagerly. No American like a stupid one.since 1980.

as Thatcher said, There is no such thing as Society.

Right idea, wrong strait. The Bosporus (the strait connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean at Istanbul, Turkey) is apparently not all that deep. During the last ice age, sea levels were low enough that it was dry. The Black Sea basin was mostly dry, fertile land with a small, freshwater lake at the lowest point. When sea levels rose, about 7500 years ago, the Black Sea filled, quite quickly, with salt water. The level would have risen by more than a foot a day, moving the shoreline by a mile or more each day in the process. Since there were modern, agricultural human societies in the region, it’s fairly clear how this would have led to the story of a great flood.

Source: PBS “Scientific American Frontiers: Beneath the Sea: Noah’s Flood”"

In lterature, floods (and the Red Sea) may be metaphors for times of uncertainty. Then a mighty leader arises to resolve the crisis.

I think Noah is part of Scientology lore. But if I’m wrong. please don’t put a rattlesnake in my mailbox.

“fools of faith” and “morons”Unnecessarily harsh language. There are a great many people of faith who are not the blithering idiots you seem to wish they were. Some may be, but not all. Your determination to be right by denigrating those you disagree with is no different than many fundamentalists. So who are you trying to persuade, us or yourself?

Watched Inherit the Wind again last night. It should be required viewing in all high schools. “This man wishes to be accorded the rights of a sponge. He wishes to think!”

Unfortunately, religion is a Catch-22; if you get deep enough into it to understand what it’s actually saying, you’re too invested in it not to believe it to some degree. But if you don’t look into it at all, you’ll sum up anywhere from 1400 to 4000 years of thought as “We’re better than you”.

The odd thing is that Austin can provide you with a complete package for debunking creationism too!

An unfortunate product of the see-say method of learning to read.

Babylonian was a local flood with a cube, not an ark. Every culture has a Flood story, all corrupted from The Flood of Noah. What do you think buried all the fossils?The Dino’s didn’t make it because it was an environmental change, but read Job 38 and tell me what they are describing?What do you think a dragon is except a dino.

The Black Sea flooding story does have evidence…600 feet down they have found pebbled beaches and former shore lines…It also explains the two different layers of water in the Black Sea……Raise a body of water 600 feet in a short period of time, and people will remember it…

The only people who can be sure about religion are Agnostics. Atheism and Belief of every stripe require faith. The winner will be whoever can prove who or what provided the dirt ball required by the Big Bang. The real contest today is between those who worship a Supreme Being and those who worship the all powerful Welfare State and the poverty that trails behind it.

And what do you call someone who hasn’t learned to spell???"

Probably someone who made a simple typo.

But someone who can’t tell the difference I might call disingenuous if I was kind, or an idiot if I was not.

“My friend says that the upcoming sequester was originally supported by Obama and I want some facts saying that Obama was against the idea of it from the start.”

@Night-Gaunt49 “Shouldn’t they watch a direct recreation or maybe a documentary instead of a heavily fictionalized account of the Scopes trial of 1925?”

>>

I had just added “Inherit the Wind” to my netflix queue when I saw this post from you. Is there a documentary, or a recreation of sorts, that you know of? Not sure how to search netflix for that….

How does “Inherit the Wind” measure up with regard to historical accuracy?

isn’t this the catholic church. the same church who blame the victims and not the clergy.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

@old1953 said:The original Noah was a Babylonian who supposedly managed to live about 30,000 years, named Utnapishtim or something like that. He was acquainted with Gilgamesh.

@puddleglum1066 said:Right idea, wrong strait. The Bosporus (the strait connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean at Istanbul, Turkey) is apparently not all that deep.Thanks for the PBS link puddleglum1066. I was not aware of the Black Sea flooding. When I started my post I was going from a recollection of an article about the Mediterranean that I had read some years ago. It sounded plausible but I obviously didn’t remember dates very well. However, Google is my friend.

Following your link and Old1953’s tip, a search for “Babylonian flood” led to a number of fascinating articles. [It is so nice to be able to call up relevant information with just the press of a few keys rather than have to spend days or weeks tediously searching for books and essays in libraries. Some of it can actually be trusted! ;-)]

The Epic of Gilgamesh, an oral masterpiece, recounts how Ut-Napishtim was told by the gods to build an ark to save himself and the animals from a great flood that was coming to punish mankind for their transgressions. Gilgamesh was a king in Babylonia who lived about 2700 BC and the earliest known record was written on tablets about 2000 BC. The Genesis story of Noah was written over the period between 950 and 550 BC and may be based on the Babylonian legend. There are many detailed similarities in the legends and a few differences. Both may be based on an even earlier stories.

From the prevalence of similar ancient great flood stories in the Mesopotamian cultures it seems plausible, even likely, that some catastrophic event did occur. [Further verified by the findings reported in the PBS article.] But humans simply cannot tolerate something just happening without a director – whether it be a cataclysmic flood or the birth of man. Gods are a necessary explanation. Couple that with the unmitigated tendency of story tellers to exaggerate and historical events become grandiose legends. It is more surprising that the stories survived a thousand years of oral retelling without more distortion!

Let’s try to keep this conversation civil. There are many people of faith who understand that religion and science have different and are able to separate the two.I keep reminding my fellow non-believers that nothing is gained by name calling.

Charles Addams explained that.

Does the institution know you got out, Sarge?

Yes, they make good horror stories when a shaman wants to make the tribe toe the line.

Go to MyFacts.com and you can get all the info about Benghazi. All you need is a credit card.In fact, give me your credit card number and I’ll get the info for you.

Nobody was worshipped like St Ronnie and St George the Lesser. Funny thing about W, when I accused people of worshipping him NOBODY ever said they didn’t….

I didn’t ask for your number.-I’ll match my credit score against your’s any day.

Hmmm, Doonesbury seems to have a proclivity for debasing and making fun of the Judeo-Christian religion. Now, I double-dog dare them to use the same tactic on the Muslim religion. (That’ll be the day…HA)!

Cal has obviously never heard of satire, along with a great many other things.