The biblical flood story, the "deluge," was a late offshoot of a cycle of flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by Sumerian Ziusudra. In Akkad, the flood hero's name was Atrakhasis. In Babylon he was Uta-Napishtim, the only mortal to become immortal. In Greece he was Deucalion, who repopulated the earth after the waters subsided, with the help of his wife Pyrrha and the advice of the Great Goddess of the waters, Themis. In Armenia, the hero was Xisuthros--a corruption of Sumerian Ziusudra--whose ark landed on Mount Ararat.

According to the original Chaldean account, the flood hero was told by his god, "Build a vessel and finish it. By a deluge I will destroy substance and life. Cause thou to go up into the vessel the substance of all that has life." Technical instructions followed: the ark was to be 600 cubits long by 60 wide, with three times 3600 measures of asphalt on its exterior and the same amount inside. Three times 3600 porters brought chests of provisions, of which 3600 chests were for the hero's immediate family, while "the mariners divided among themselves twice three thousand six hundred chests." It seems that Noah's ark was much smaller than earlier heroic proportions.

As long ago as 1872, George Smith translated the Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal's library, and discovered the earlier version of the flood myth. Among the details that religious orthodoxy took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn't want her earthly children drowned. Mother Isthar severely punished the disobedient god by cursing him with her "great lightnings." She set her magic rainbow in the heavens to block his access to offerings on earthly altars, "since rashly he caused the flood-storm, and handed over my people to destruction."

Old Testament writers copied other details of the ancient flood myth but could not allow their god to be punished by the Great Whore of Babylon, as if he were a naughty child sent to bed without supper by an angry mother. Thus, they transformed Ishtar's rainbow barrier into a "sign of the covenant" voluntarily set in the heavens by God himself (Genesis 9:13).

The Tigris-Euphrates valley was subject to disastrous floods. One especially was long remembered; geologists have linked it with the volcanic cataclysm that blew apart the island of Thera (Santorin) and destroyed Cretan civilization. When Sir Leonard Woolley was excavating the site of Ur, he found the track of a might flood--a layer of clay without artifacts, eight feet thick. Such a flood may have been identified with the watery Chaos that all Indo-European peoples believed would swallow up the world at the end of its cycle, and out of which a new world would be reborn in the womb of the Formless Mother. The ark and its freight represented seeds of life passing through the period of Chaos from the destruction of one universe to the birth of the next. Even in the Bible, the "birth" was heralded by the Goddess' yonic dove (Genesis 8:12).

Gnostic literature preserved the older view of the flood-causing God as an evil destroyer of humanity, and the Goddess as its preserver. Because people refused to worship him alone, jealous Jehovah sent the flood to wipe out all life. Fortunately the Goddess opposed him, "and Noah and his family were saved in the ark by means of the sprinkling of light that proceeded from her, and through it the world was again filled with humankind."

This Gnostic interpretation had both Babylonian and Hellenic roots. Greeks said the primal sea-mother Themis gave Deucalion and his wife occult knowledge ("light") of how to create human beings from stones, "the bones of their Mother," i.e., of the earth. Raising up living people from stones or bones was a popular miracle. Jesus mentioned it, and Ezekiel's God claimed to have done it in the valley of bones (Ezekiel 37).

Keskustelua vedenpaisumuksesta kahden osanottajan välillä alt.religion.mormon-ryhmässä

You make a big pretense of knowing something, but you really won't say what it is any better than someone who says he merely believes something.

[snipped my old stuff that stated there is no evidence of a world wide flood]

I was not the one who started the thread. I merely mentioned that I believed the Genesis account, and someone from a designated atheist website decided I was too ripe not to try to proselytize to his religion. By the way, shouldn't it be anti-theist? If there is no God, then why tilt at windmills? People who don't believe in Genesis get on a religion newsgroup and get in a snit when they hear someone believes in it? Why don't you get on the "Hardware News Group" or something and complain that everyone is obsessed with tools? I say to one and all on A.R.M.--if religious subjects and religious beliefs make you nauseated, then go somewhere else.

I'll say one thing for Southern Baptists--knowing them as I do, I can definitely predict that none of them would hang around a gay bar for two or three months in a row, all the while protesting that they were actually "straight."

I think you're trying to tell me that I don't belong here?? And what reasoning would that be? Is it just because I like to study the physical world around us and put 2 and 2 together???

Not to mention that I personally have wasted time and resources in the past supporting a "belief system" that was clearly dominated by man-made doctrines and practices. And it's human nature to help others avoid our pit falls.

You can't bury you head in the sand and hope the "facts" of the real world around you will just go away.

Lets analyze shall we:

There is point at which the theories of science become fact, ie: no longer just a "belief". Although we do not currently have a precise set of equations that represent quantum gravity, I still know for a "fact" what will happen if I jump off a cliff.

You're trying to compare apples and oranges. Science and religion are fundamentally different. A belief (Noah's flood story as just part of this case study) that has no evidence, and that is part of a larger belief "system" can and does have a significant impact on society. We have reached a point in our society (and world community) where adherents of fundamentalist religions feel compelled to teach their children to mistrust science, because many of the discoveries of science have failed to vindicate their "belief system", and in many cases disproven them. The extreme application of this tactic results in isolation and divisions in society, which widens the gulf between the "haves" and "have nots" (those who use, understand, and benefit from technology verse those who distrust it and avoid it), which in turn can result in civil unrest.

I am not against the humanitarian efforts of fundamentalist religions, in fact, as time goes on that may be their only redeeming trait. Its those who isolate themselves from others, and show spiritual arrogance, and fail to look for other reasons why things happen other than simple minded attitudes like: "We're caught in this battle between God and Satan."

I am not ashamed to say that as a child, I was influenced by the philosophy of Gene Roddenberry, the mind behind Star Trek. Granted it's only a TV show, but when view philosophically, the world that Gene Rodenbery created was a world where man has struggled to overcome, through science and technology, the limitations and inequalities of traditional human society. Could it be possible for us to actually solve some of our own inherent problems, ie: cure diseases, repair genetic flaws, obtain cheap fusion energy, create better, cheaper food, invent better, cheaper transportation, computers etc... etc...etc..? Did you know that today there are genetic studies underway with prison populations to see if there is a genetic reason for criminality or "evil"?

To me the endeavors of man to theorize, experiment, analyze, quantify, discover, build, repair, and create a better world are far more worthy and noble a tasks than to whine and moan about the alleged writings of a God who's alleged message is that just because things don't go His way He's going to destroy the earth and only His "chosen" ones will be rewarded the spoils.

Noble and worthy pursuits on one hand, petty and simple minded, and even hindering on the other.

Bottom line, it's not just a little bit hypocritical that you benefit from, in addition to enjoying and using the fruits of the methods of science, and yet on the other hand reject many of the other discoveries made by such a methodology.