NOAH’S ARK AND HUMAN STUPIDITY

           Today, March 28, 2014, Hollywood will release a film called “Noah” starring Russell Crowe. While Christian groups will nit-pick the biblical accuracy of the film, I want to discuss the total absurdity of the biblical story and the stupidity of the people who believe in it. My point was made very well by Bill Maher in a recent television show where he said:

“No one can blame me when I say this is a stupid country when 60 percent of the adults in it think the Noah's Ark story is literally true--which is why I'm already sick of the ads for this floating piece of giraffe crap. You believe a man, Noah, lived to be 900 years old, that's what the Bible said, and when he was 500, he decided to have three kids just like Clint Eastwood. And when he was 600, he and his three 100-year-old sons built a boat unto which, in one day, they loaded over 3 million animals, all of which were apparently indigenous to within five miles of the boat.

"The thing that's really disturbing about Noah isn't that it’s silly, it's that it's immoral. It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it--and his name is God. Genesis says God was so angry with Himself for screwing up when he made mankind so flawed, that he sent the flood to kill everyone--men, women, children, babies. What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he's mad at? I mean besides Chris Christie.

"You know conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality. Well maybe it's because you worship a guy who drowns babies. And then God's genius plan after he kills everyone is to repopulate the world with a new crop of the same ass-holes who pissed him off the first time with predictable results. He kills millions more. If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away. Why are we getting our morals out of this book? Why are people following any of it?"

I can cite many reasons why the Noah story in the Bible is simply a fairy tale, but that should be obvious to ordinarily rational people. Nevertheless, for some reason, many people believe this garbage, so I must point-out several things:

In the first place, there are two flood stories in Genesis.  In one, God tells Noah that he is going to destroy sinful mankind with a flood and that Noah is to take his family and two of every kind of animal on board the Ark (Genesis 6:19).  In the other, God directs Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals, of every type, and one pair of the unclean (Genesis 7:2). The reason that there are two stories is because there were different people who wrote different stories at different times which were later stitched together into what we now call Genesis. It was not written by Moses as is claimed in the Bible.

According to the Bible, the Ark was 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. Try to imagine fitting all those millions of animals onto the Ark. There are currently 5,488 species of mammals on earth. There would be two (or seven) of every kind of elephant, rhinoceros, hippo, gorilla, ox, bull, cow, horse, pony, lion, tiger, Komodo Dragon, zebra, bear, giraffe, wildabeeste, elk, moose, pandas, buffalo, Llama, panther, pigs, dogs, racoons, etc. Because of the extinction of species in the past few thousand years, there no doubt were thousands more species at the time that Noah was supposed to have lived. However, the Bible says that Noah took two (or seven) of every kind of “animal” on board the ark, so this includes all species in addition to mammals, including amphibians, birds, reptiles, and insects, which in today’s world would account for over 2.4 million animals. It would have been impossible for many of the animals to come from distant parts of the world. How could kangaroos and koalas get from Australia to the Middle East? How did Noah keep lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and hyenas from attacking deer, elk, antelope, sheep and other kinds of natural prey? How did Noah feed all those animals? Many of these animals constituted the primary source of food for other animals. How did he and his family clean-up after the animals?

Some time ago ABC News did a story about some Christian archeologists from Texas who claimed to have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark. They apparently found something that looked to them like the Ark on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range rather than on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the site identified in Genesis 8:4. Nevertheless, they believed it was the Ark. "I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark," said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute--a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.

We have to wonder at the pathetic spectacle of “scientific” teams of grown people going out and climbing mountains to find the remains of Noah’s Ark. It is a little sad. Serious archeologists, geologists, historians, and theologians know that the story of Noah’s Ark is an ancient myth, a fairy tale, not history. It never happened. Fundamentalist Christians and Jews might argue that the building of the Ark was a miracle and that the whole story must be taken as miraculous. Why then do they go out on safaris trying to find the actual Ark? Surely if it was a miraculous vessel that God created only for that one period of time, it would not still survive today.

Anthropoligists and paleoanthropoligists have used fossils and DNA to trace the history of man. They know that our species originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They recognize that man evolved from lower animals over a period of millions of years. There has been no worldwide flood interfering with human history. Moreover, geologists are unable to find any physical evidence of the kind of worldwide flood spoken about in the Bible.

The story of Noah and the Flood did not originate with the writers of the Hebrew Bible. It was borrowed from ancient Mesopotamian myths that precede the writing of the Bible by thousands of years. The Mesopotamian myths were written about different gods and different people.

I agree with Bill Maher that in order to believe in the story of Noah’s Ark one has to be stupid. Not just uninformed, not just religious or reverant, but downright stupid. There is no basis in history, science, or even theology to believe in this silly story. Some people think that Americans are smarter than people in other parts of the world. The fact that so many Americans believe in the Noah’s Ark myth indicates to me that we are really no smarter than most of the other people in the world.

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CHRISTIANS, THE TEA PARTY, AND THE POOR

            The Tea Party movement arose out of anger at the use of taxpayer money to help the poor during the recession. In February 2009, the day after President Obama announced his Making Homes Affordable plan to help people facing mortgage foreclosures, a reporter for CNBC named Rick Santelli went on a rant at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against the proposal and announced that: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All of you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”

            The Chicago rant went viral and immediately attracted millions of right-wingers who were enraged that the government was going to spend billions of dollars to help poor people, particularly African Americans, whom they deemed to be lazy, shiftless, and undeserving. Said Santelli: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills.” There was not a word of sympathy for the families undergoing the agonizing trial of losing their homes, often because they had lost their jobs. While President Obama showed deep empathy for the misery and distress of these people, Tea Partiers all over the country organized and struck out against those suffering terrible hardship from the effects of the great recession.

            Naturally, the mass of adherents to this newly named right-wing movement were people who call themselves “Christians.” Those ultra-conservatives use their religion not only as a comfort and consolation, but also as a weapon to bludgeon those with different theologies and values. Their so-called Christian pastors can drive their congregations into frenzies of hatred merely by attacking abortionists, gays, liberals, Hollywood types, the ACLU, atheists, Moslems and Jews.

            It is the belief of these “Christians” that Almighty God came down to earth in the form of a wandering Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. They assert that unless you believe that Jesus was the eternal creator of the universe and the “Son” of God, you are doomed to spend eternity in Hell or in the outer darkness.

            Nevertheless, they do not seem to pay any attention to the teachings or example of Jesus. They are wildly antagonistic to the idea of government helping the poor even though helping the poor was the cornerstone of the life of Jesus. Surely Jesus did not mean that although we should all help the poor, government should do no such thing. I doubt that Jesus would have agreed with the anti-poor fury of today’s right-wingers. It is surprising that so many of these Christians can quote the Bible, yet seem indifferent to the message that Jesus left with us.

            One of the finest modern books about Jesus is Thomas Cahill’s Desire Of The Everlasting Hills. In his book, Cahill zeroes-in on the great moral teachings of Jesus, and movingly describes that part of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells of the second coming and tells the story of the King who says, “...for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was naked and you clothed me…I was sick and you visited me ...as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35-40). Says Cahill:

It is ironic that some Christians …

have never bothered to heed

these solemn words about the presence of

Christ in every individual who is in need.

Jesus told us only once (at the Last Supper)

that he would be present in the Bread and

Wine, but he tells us repeatedly in the

gospels that he is always present in the

Poor and Afflicted---to whom we should

all bow and kneel.

            It is plain from reading the many passages of the Bible where Jesus spoke about the poor that he did not believe that they were worthless and undeserving leeches on society. He favored the poor. He even counseled some to sell everything they had and give to the poor (Matt. 19.21). He wanted his followers to see him in the faces of the poor and afflicted. How would he have felt to be spit upon and despised by the Tea Party people of today.