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Author | Topic: Why did Noah's descendents forsake God so quickly? | |||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
If you look at every nation on earth from the athiest chinese to the australian aboriginies to the american indians, they all have legends involving a worldwide flood with only a few people surviving in a vessel. (N.B: this is not actually true.)
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Samples from six continents and the islands of the sea; hundreds of such legends are known: I have researched flood myths extensively, and all the cherry-picking in the world won't make your original statement true.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I have no idea what you mean by that. Please elaborate.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Noting that...
quote: a casual search ..and bearing in mind my noting atheism to belong on the list of ways in which the truth of God is suppressed, we can describe these gods as an evolutionary stage on the way to atheism. What better way to deny having to give an account to God than to deny an afterlife in which that account will be given? Except that, as you can see from reading your own link, the Greeks did believe in eternal punishment for the wicked and impious. What they lacked, apparently, was the idea of eternal bliss for True Believers. Why would anyone suppress that, if they knew it to be true, but keep the idea of eternal suffering? Spiritual masochism?
We wouldn't be dealing with just any old story. This story would involve the spiritually-driven hatred of things-God. Consider for example, the speed at which the Israelites dispensed with a knowledge of God having just been transported through a parted sea. They had barely shaken the sea-bottom sand from their sandals before embarking on a project involving a golden calf idol. But here you seem to be defending one implausible aspect of the Bible by pointing to, if anything, an even more implausible aspect and holding it up as normative. It's as though I questioned the story about the talking snake, and you replied: "Oh, that's nothing, in the Book of Joshua there's a story about a pig playing the banjo".
We wouldn't be dealing with just any old story. This story would involve the spiritually-driven hatred of things-God. But this is contrary to observation of how people actually behave. If we look at Christians, for example, they mostly seem quite able to hold on to the faith of their forefathers even though, if there is a God, the manifest signs of his presence over the last couple of millennia amount to, at most, a nod and a wink. But in the case of the descendants of Noah, they apparently all rejected the religion they'd been brought up in even while there were living eyewitnesses to the fact that God was quite prepared to kill everyone who was displeasing in his sight.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
It is interesting to note that this paradise (inevitably) fits the bill suggested for unbiblical religion in general. A positive afterlife outcome depends upon what a man does in this life. Which pretty much harpoons your prior claim that they were trying to "deny having to give an account to God" by "deny[ing] an afterlife in which that account will be given". Now that you know that you were completely wrong about Greek attitudes to the afterlife, would you like to try again? Apparently they did go on believing that there would be bad stuff for the impious and good stuff for the pious. However, while believing that, someone at some point, having been brought up knowing about the one God of Noah, decided to impiously invent polytheism, while continuing to teach that the wages of impiety were eternal suffering. I am having trouble imagining such a man.
That's not quite how things are set up Dr.A. The OP questions how, given the flood and a surviving 8, we arrive at the current scenario. I'm merely pointing out the biblical narrative from the one assumed to the answer requested. I think your answer is fallacious. Consider the following discussion: Bob: Yesterday a ten ton weight fell on me. And then later that day someone cut my head off with a chainsaw. Alice: But ... but if a ten-ton weight fell on you, why aren't you dead? Bob: Why, if you'd been paying attention to what I've been saying, you'd have noticed that I also told you that someone cut my head off with a chainsaw. So you can see that I must be immune to injury, otherwise how could I be standing here? Alice: But ... but I don't believe that you had your head cut off with a chainsaw, either. If anything, that claim seems even more implausible. Bob: That's not quite how things are set up, Alice. You said: "if" a ten-ton weight fell on me. You are therefore working through the consequences of the proposition that what I said is true. Now the Boblical narrative (see what I did there) also says that I survived having my head cut off by a chainsaw. We must therefore continue this discussion on the basis that I am in fact immune to injury. Alice: But ... but ... If you can see what's wrong with Bob's argument, you can see what's wrong with yours.
The children of Noah would have been born unbelievers and would have - until such time as they became believers (if at all) denied and perverted any truth of God to which they were exposed. Such is the nature of unbelievers. The Christians you speak of would be believers. Which means you're comparing the actions of apples (for whom no evidence of God is enough) and pears (who, having faith, have all the evidence for God that they need). But surely Noah and his children would have raised their descendants to believe in God. They would have believed. If anyone in history would have totally believed in God, and thought that obeying him was vitally important, it would have been Noah and his children and their wives, who out of all mankind were saved because they did what God told them to do. Naturally they would have raised their children to believe the same way. And people do, overwhelmingly, believe what their parents raise them to believe. Religions don't change fast. Of all human ideas, they are the most immune to change. And yet it seems that Noah's descendants changed from believers in Noah's God to polytheistic idolaters even when they still had Noah around to tell them that they were wrong, not just as a matter of faith, but as a simple matter of fact. "There is one God," he could have said. "He wants you to do these things, he doesn't want you to do those things. He killed everyone in the world except me because they did those things. That's the sort of God he is. I saw it. I was there". And yet his descendants wouldn't have followed his religious beliefs even though it is manifestly the case that clinging on to the religious beliefs people were raised in is one of the most constant aspects of human nature?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
So, yeah, daddy says God is good, and you should serve and worship him, but then daddy's the kind of guy who upon finding his father - your grandfather - drunk thought it would be a good idea to get jiggy with him! That's not actually what the Bible says. See Genesis 9. I think maybe you're confusing Noah with Lot (Genesis 19). Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
"Covered the nakedness of" is a Jewish euphemism. No it isn't. "Uncover the nakedness of" is a Jewish euphemism. (See Leviticus 18 and 20). The meaning of the verse in Genesis 9 is plain. Ham saw his father in a naked drunken stupor, and Shem and Japheth covered him up. It says: "And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness." There's no way you can interpret that as meaning that they "got jiggy" with him. They took a garment and covered him up without even looking at him.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I really can't be bothered to argue the point. A wise decision. Though you might manage to muster the effort to thank me for setting you right. It would be nice if that happened now and then.
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