Doesn't that at the very least demonstrate that it's not inspired word of a divine being? Or if it is, then that divine being clearly doesn't give a shit about preserving his message through the ages.
Which obviously doesn't mean that everything in the bible is false. I'm sure it contains a wealth of priceless historical knowledge.
But when it starts talking about the supernatural, or when people start citing it as a default authority on truth, that's where you lose me.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?
I completely agree with everything you said. One of the most fascinating things is how the story of Noah's flood is being validated in some ways, and exactly as you said that is one of the stories that far far predates the old testament.
Now we have prominent scientists and archeologists openly discussing the growing evidence for a world wide flooding event that would've wiped out most if not all civilizations on the planet. And not just one major catastrophic flood, but a series of them spread over a few thousand years.
And what I find really interesting is that the time frame for this flooding puts it at the very dawn of pre-history; the earliest known beginnings of human civilization.
Which seems to strongly imply that the stone age wasn't civilization starting, but rather civilization RE-starting. Which just begs at the mystery of how far along humans had developed before the cataclysm.
Our civilization went from the bronze age to the internet age in 5,000 years. Meanwhile our ancestors before the cataclysm would've had hundreds of thousands of years of a stable environment to develop in.
Enough time for space faring civilizations to rise and fall several times over.
If you're interested in the historicity (as they term it) of Noah's Flood, you may be interested in this:
A few years ago I read a book called "Gods of the New Millennium" by Alan Alford, published in 1999. Just as one tiny part of it, he attempts to date the Flood using a genealogy of patriarchs given in the Bible, starting with a generally accepted year of birth for with Abraham and backing up to Noah.
He observed, though, that the ages at which the men had their sons seemed to be off, being in their late 20's or early 30's, which is fairly late even these days. He surmised that over the immense time span, transcribers had monkeyed with the ages in two ways. First, they had misunderstood numbers written in the Sumerian sexagesimal system (base 60) as decimal. Later, others had thought the high numbers unreasonable and "corrected" them by dividing by a factor of what he believed was five.
Alford undoes these "fixes", adds up the ages, and comes up with a date of 10983 BC for the Flood. Sound familiar? That's pretty much exactly the date of the suspected Younger Dryas Impact, causing huge climatic changes and including a sea level rise of 400 feet. Sounds like we have our Flood!
Alford never mentions the Younger Dryas, the associated Impact Hypothesis, or Meltwater Pulse 1B. I think he was entirely ignorant of these and I believe much of the research had not yet been done. Yet there he is hitting the unknown target dead bullseye.
So then you flip it back around and see that the story of Noah's Flood has been handed down for 13,000 years, starting with people that were basically Stone Age. It makes you give that story a lot of leeway considering, you know, maybe some of the fine details might have gotten changed along the way... lol
Doesn't that at the very least demonstrate that it's not inspired word of a divine being? Or if it is, then that divine being clearly doesn't give a shit about preserving his message through the ages.
Which obviously doesn't mean that everything in the bible is false. I'm sure it contains a wealth of priceless historical knowledge.
But when it starts talking about the supernatural, or when people start citing it as a default authority on truth, that's where you lose me.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?
I completely agree with everything you said. One of the most fascinating things is how the story of Noah's flood is being validated in some ways, and exactly as you said that is one of the stories that far far predates the old testament.
Now we have prominent scientists and archeologists openly discussing the growing evidence for a world wide flooding event that would've wiped out most if not all civilizations on the planet. And not just one major catastrophic flood, but a series of them spread over a few thousand years.
And what I find really interesting is that the time frame for this flooding puts it at the very dawn of pre-history; the earliest known beginnings of human civilization.
Which seems to strongly imply that the stone age wasn't civilization starting, but rather civilization RE-starting. Which just begs at the mystery of how far along humans had developed before the cataclysm.
Our civilization went from the bronze age to the internet age in 5,000 years. Meanwhile our ancestors before the cataclysm would've had hundreds of thousands of years of a stable environment to develop in.
Enough time for space faring civilizations to rise and fall several times over.
If you're interested in the historicity (as they term it) of Noah's Flood, you may be interested in this:
A few years ago I read a book called "Gods of the New Millennium" by Alan Alford, published in 1999. Just as one tiny part of it, he attempts to date the Flood using a genealogy of patriarchs given in the Bible, starting with a generally accepted year of birth for with Abraham and backing up to Noah.
He observed, though, that the ages at which the men had their sons seemed to be off, being in their late 20's or early 30's, which is fairly late even these days. He surmised that over the immense time span, transcribers had monkeyed with the ages in two ways. First, they had misunderstood numbers written in the Sumerian sexagesimal system (base 60) as decimal. Later, others had thought the high numbers unreasonable and "corrected" them by dividing by a factor of what he believed was five.
Alford undoes these "fixes", adds up the ages, and comes up with a date of 10983 BC for the Flood. Sound familiar? That's pretty much exactly the date of the suspected Younger Dryas Impact, causing huge climatic changes and including a sea level rise of 400 feet. Sounds like we have our Flood!
Alford never mentions the Younger Dryas, the associated Impact Hypothesis, or Meltwater Pulse 1B. I think he was entirely ignorant of these and I believe much of the research had not yet been done. Yet there he is hitting the unknown target dead bullseye.
So then you flip it back around and see that the story of Noah's Flood has been handed down for 13,000 years, starting with people that were basically Stone Age. It makes you give that story a lot of leeway considering, you know, maybe some of the fine details might have gotten changed along the way... lol