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Yes, it’s not only rain even as per Quran

“At length, behold! there came our Command, and the fountains of the earth gushed forth.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:40

and

“O Earth! swallow up your water, and O Sky! withhold your rain! and the water abated and the matter was ended. The Ark rested on Mount Judi.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:44

In the Bible's offense, it probably wasn't even originally a flood story.

Fair point! Its been a while since I heard this in my childhood, but I remember them explicitly telling us "it rained" without any other source.

Granted, we were children lol but if the artist had a Sunday school like mine then that likely is the basis for missing that bit 🙃

Oh, i guess it all makes sense now........

The Old Testament doesn’t do a lot to give the idea that god is “benevolent” or “kind”

Cruelty was kinda the schtick

Another take: God is an asshole and modeled men after himself. Explains a lot if you think about human history, doesn't it?

And of course there is no god, only delusions to keep the population under check. Humans are simply assholes by nature.

Well, omnipotency is out, I believe. An omnipotent god needs, by definition, be equally able and likely to be exceedingly cruel as wellwilling. The question is, why would such a god hav given Noah the task of building an arc in the first place?

And the question of humanities "free will" is another nail in the coffin. Either humans only have free will for as much as whatever whim the omnipotent god allows for, or of the free will is immutable, then there is one thing the "omnipotent" god can't do, and thus omnipotence is out...

I am being pedantic here, but "cruelty" doesn't seem like quite the right word. If you made something, like a drawing or a story, and then got rid of it, the point isn't to cause suffering, but rather to throw it away. "Indifference" would fit better. And... either way, a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work? "Omnipotent" there being a relative word, that the ancient people's would not have been able to distinguish b/t forms like your more common garden-variety space alien (e.g. 2001 Odyssey) all the way up to external-reality entity (e.g. The Matrix).

Anyway my point is that it is people who are the ones that are cruel, b/c we are no better than anyone else, yet we delight in causing suffering. The only other animal I have ever heard of who shares that trait is the Chimpanzee, who btw also just so happens to be the closest living relative that humans have on this planet. \s on that being a coincidence ofc, when we share ~99% genetic similarity.

I think I figured the math on the assumption that Noah's kids brought significant others with and it was technically possible to avoid parent-child pairings so long as each unrelated male female combination was utilized, which is to say they screwed each others wives in addition to their own. Not like the bible gives a fuck about parent child incest babies, that was Lot's whole character arc.

The animals, on the other hand, those are all shit out of luck.

Right? Like people in the local area may have been terrible, but there were other people.

It wouldn't. It would just break apart like if was hit with a huge mallet.

Here's the thing, society formed around agrarian settlements. What do you need for crops, livestock, AND people? What makes transporting your goods easier? If you said water, you get a prize. Many of our settlements, both modern and historic, were near water sources. Water sources flood. Inevitably, water sources experience thousand-year flood events, and completely swamp a huge area, maybe even wiping out one or more settlements. As you start going back in history, you also start dealing with glacial dam rupture events, which also almost certainly scoured away everything downstream and would have seemingly come out of nowhere at all.

The phenomenon of the global flood myth is really just that people live near water, and when you live near water, shit happens.

No we don't have to do that, not at all.

Floods happen, sometimes big floods happen, humans tend to live near water, so when big floods happen lots of humans die. The stories grow by being retold, eventually you get the mother of all floods stories.

I don't have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific. We have secular history and from there we can know what really happened. Now, the Bible is consistent on very little, homophobia is one of those things it is consistent on. The solution is not to be an apologist for the text. The solution is throw out that bronze age crap and be nice to the LGBT.

I did this crap when I was working my way out of religion and no one has to make the same mistakes I did. It wasn't really slavery, it wasn't really racism, it wasn't really genocide, it wasn't really homophobia, it wasn't really oppression...rip the band-aid off! It was slavery, it was racism, it was homophobia, it was brutal oppression.

So what does "equivalent to a firehose" mean in this case? What area per firehose? A football stadium per firehose? An Olympic swimming pool? An average room? A jar?

EDIT: I think it's about one firehose per 10x10 meter area, so like a couple of rooms worth of area. It's not that bad. I bet rainfalls like that do happen for a few minutes in taiphoons and such.

Why?

Featuring a special guest: Sanctimonious Pontificator Claims Authority about What's Funny to Internet.

Just remember, most western atheists were Christians for a long time first. They ain't outsiders talking about a faith they don't understand, they are people of the same culture criticizing that culture.

In short, they own the Bible just as much as you do.