Sunday, July 29, 2012

Is this really a children's' story?

Those of us who grew up christian are familiar with the story of Noah's Ark.  40 days and 40 nights of rain, the flood, the Ark, animals being brought in two by two, etc.

Americans are often familiar with Bill Cosby's rendition of it, too:  Zooba, zooba, "Noah!"  "Huh?  Who's that?" ... "It's The Lord, Noah!" ... "Right!"

Lotsa laughs, wasn't it?

I remember thinking at some point about the fact that this meant that we would all be descendants of Noah, and how that made it awfully funny that so many people resulted from so few in such a short period of time, but then remembered that the Genesis story resulted from just two, so my child's brain just shrugged it off.

But, my adult brain eventually got all tangled up in it, especially once I got edu-ma-cated and realized that there has never been any evidence of a world-wide flood, so that little story just got relegated to the "fiction" column.

And I just kind of forgot about it for a while.

Then Chris Hallquist over at Freethought Blogs wrote a piece on it today on his blog, The Uncredible Hallq, entitled, Yeah, the Bible is not for children, and then it hit me:

This is a story about genocide!  Not just any old story about genocide, but a story about MASS genocide!  This is the fabrication of a story of a god who was so angry at humanity's not obeying HIS rules that he was willing to kill 99.99% of all life on this planet to reset things back to a more manageable number that he could apparently control.

Kinda sad, dontcha think, that the god of creation couldn't control more than a handful of people?  And that he had to kill so much vibrant life and destroy so much habitat for a redo?  Of course, another uncertain part is, what happened to the folks' souls who he killed?  Heaven, hell? Limbo?  

Oh, wait, I forgot, the Pope decided that limbo isn't there anymore... or maybe never was...

All of a sudden, this story isn't so funny any more.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once again, you are showing a true knowledge of your Cathoicism! The Pope never put anything out on the term limbo that was adopted as a dogma of the Church.(the Pope can only speak infallibly when he states he is-aka if he wakes up one morning and says that the sky is purple doesn't mean it is-and the cardinals have to agree with a 2/3 majority...Check wiki, 15 minute read and pretty accurate-better than your false notion!) The Church always said that this was up for debate but theologian were the ones to come up with the term! This is simple Catholicisms 101. Even Wikipedia came up with the correct history! I will not even get into you assessment of the Bible because that is much more invovled and is really step two!
Your being raised(obviously) in the protestant mindset(or badly catechized Catholic?-same difference!), has done nothing but teach you heresy and none-truths of Catholicism. Before you bust, educate!(From the source, not the hear-say/heresy!)

Unknown said...

...and once again, you display your inability to read. I never said what you said, it was simply a rather, admittedly, snarky comment that wasn't really pertinent to the real story.

Then you ignore the real story. Nothing I said about the Noah story was about the Catholic religion, or Catholic dogma or whatever Catholic. It is a Christian thing, every bible has it, and different denominations have a different spin on it, but they all gloss over the fact that it is about a mass genocidal action.

Please, learn to read.