HughMcB wrote:Good luck Aggie, that's a herculean undertaking.

yes I know and I probably won't get all the way through it before I shuffle off.

Also I'm questioning whether I should post everything I read and rewrite here, I don't want to be a bore.

Sorry, Aggi, I will read your book but I have my Bible, the Book that rules and guides my life, my own Holy Scripture that I can never turn my back on.

Oh Hai!!!

http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Can you ever hope to match the beautiful, profound prose as found in say verses 1 - 3 :



Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

mindyourmind wrote:Sorry, Aggi, I will read your book but I have my Bible, the Book that rules and guides my life, my own Holy Scripture that I can never turn my back on.

Oh Hai!!!

http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Can you ever hope to match the beautiful, profound prose as found in say verses 1 - 3 :



Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, mindyourmind!

I can haz hourz of fun wit dis, srsly.

You two are going straight to hell for enjoying such blasphemy. I'm laughing so much I can't spellz siriuzly.

Callan wrote:

mindyourmind wrote:Sorry, Aggi, I will read your book but I have my Bible, the Book that rules and guides my life, my own Holy Scripture that I can never turn my back on.

Oh Hai!!!

http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Can you ever hope to match the beautiful, profound prose as found in say verses 1 - 3 :



Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, mindyourmind!

I can haz hourz of fun wit dis, srsly.

I haz mayd another convurt, hai.

Agrippina wrote:You two are going straight to hell for enjoying such blasphemy. I'm laughing so much I can't spellz siriuzly.

Wan day you too will come to Ceiling Cat's sandbox, and play, and laffs, and haz cheezburgers. After finish yor Bibul. Iz ok.

I'm not sure whether my calculations are right here.
What I think is that the length of their lives was some attempt at either filling up what was only 10 generations and according to historical traditional calculation a mere 300 years, i.e. 3 generations per 100 years to stretch it to thousands of years.
Or, on the other hand, the more or less 1,000 year lifetimes was the lifetime of the particular direct offspring of each of the main characters, i.e. Seth wasn't Adam's direct son, but one of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren, named as his "son' and in each of the main characters' lives they named them as a son when they were born whatever number of years after the birth of the ancestor.

Thus Jared could have been Mahalaeel's grandchild, being born when he was 65. and that his direct line lived for 900+ years.
This is just my supposition and me trying to make some sense of this.

I remember hearing someone trying to reason out the ludicrous life spans in the old testament saying that perhaps the "1000 year" lifespans were actually "1000 moons", which works out to about 83 years...? 900 years would be a far more believeable 900 moons, or 75 years.

Of course this doesn't work with the shorter ones, does it...

johnbrandt wrote:I remember hearing someone trying to reason out the ludicrous life spans in the old testament saying that perhaps the "1000 year" lifespans were actually "1000 moons", which works out to about 83 years...? 900 years would be a far more believeable 900 moons, or 75 years.

Of course this doesn't work with the shorter ones, does it...

No it doesn't and 60+ years is a stretch as well. People around 3000 BCE, i.e. ordinary people living in the desert would not have lived for more than 40 years at the most. That's why I think that it was that they had one family member whose name the remembered and who was perhaps directly related to the ancestor and that they more or less counted them as the next generation when they were grand or grand-grand children. Also note the difference between Adam's and Seth's actual age and the age given by Genesis, the one is 950 years, if you add the age at Seth's birth and the years he lived afterwards, yet the text says 930 years., and Seth says he lived for 807 years after Enos' birth making him 937 at his death but the text says 912. This is a clear indication that the writers were either not paying attention and didn't think that people would notice the discrepancy or they were neglectful in their calculations. Whatever the reason, it is a clear indication of error because, in Seth's case 25 years is a big difference.

I don't think it was counting months, I'm inclined to go with generations of names being skipped over and only the more important patriarchs being noted and that the hundreds of years was the length of their direct line.

Another point is that if Adam did live for 900 years, he would have been alive at the time that Lamech was born. Wouldn't that have been a phenomenal observation to make, i.e. that on the day that Lamech was born, his ancestor Adam was there to bless him. And Noah, 600 years old when he built the ark, please, that's a little ridiculous, I couldn't lift a hammer to built a ark when I was a tenth of that age.

More coming.
I'm not going to post anymore walls of text, just my observations about what I read. It's too much to expect comments on every single line of this informative but very boring book.

Aggie, are you certain gawd hasn't inspired you to re-write the babble? The question is, do you have any strange dreams at night at all ? You know the type, brainstorms and such while in the shower or sitting down at dinner. You may be a prophet and not be aware of it.

angelo wrote:Aggie, are you certain gawd hasn't inspired you to re-write the babble? The question is, do you have any strange dreams at night at all ? You know the type, brainstorms and such while in the shower or sitting down at dinner. You may be a prophet and not be aware of it.

If by strange dreams you mean lions invading my garden and stopping me from going to work, and then having to explain to Wilhelmina Slater that I lost my car on the way to work, yes, I'm having strange dreams.

Seriously though, I want to be able to argue from an informed point of view.
I tend to take on mammoth tasks and then get bored but I need to have some sort of scholarly thing to do, otherwise I get bored. So this kind of boredom is at least informative and also, because I know the history, it puts both a historical and an atheist's point of view into the interpretation. Well, let's see where it takes me, I'm about to tackle the Flud!!

Agrippina wrote:Now listen guys, I'm rewriting it so that evolution can be put in and the real story can be told, in order to do this, I have a story-teller. I intend to stick to the original as much as possible, except for things that are out of order like plants coming before animals, I'm putting it the right way around, and I'll even include real events as much as I, a neophyte to the science of evolution, am able to, so this is where you come in, you have to set me right.

For now, I'm watching Lord of the Rings, there's more truth in that than the bible.

And much more inspiration. (Of course, the author was a devout Catholic!)

Good luck with the project. Thomas Jefferson once undertook to edit the New Testament and remove all the impossibilities and the hatred. What was left, as he said, "stood out like diamonds in a dung-heap." It was mostly the fatuous advice given in the Sermon on the Mount, minus the hell-fire. It's a very short book, published as The Jefferson Bible.

Agrippina wrote:

angelo wrote:Aggie, are you certain gawd hasn't inspired you to re-write the babble? The question is, do you have any strange dreams at night at all ? You know the type, brainstorms and such while in the shower or sitting down at dinner. You may be a prophet and not be aware of it.

If by strange dreams you mean lions invading my garden and stopping me from going to work, and then having to explain to Wilhelmina Slater that I lost my car on the way to work, yes, I'm having strange dreams.

Seriously though, I want to be able to argue from an informed point of view.
I tend to take on mammoth tasks and then get bored but I need to have some sort of scholarly thing to do, otherwise I get bored. So this kind of boredom is at least informative and also, because I know the history, it puts both a historical and an atheist's point of view into the interpretation. Well, let's see where it takes me, I'm about to tackle the Flud!!

It's others who get bored when I take on mammoth tusks. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

I'm about to tackle the Flud!

That should be interesting !

Roger Cooke wrote:

Agrippina wrote:Now listen guys, I'm rewriting it so that evolution can be put in and the real story can be told, in order to do this, I have a story-teller. I intend to stick to the original as much as possible, except for things that are out of order like plants coming before animals, I'm putting it the right way around, and I'll even include real events as much as I, a neophyte to the science of evolution, am able to, so this is where you come in, you have to set me right.

For now, I'm watching Lord of the Rings, there's more truth in that than the bible.

And much more inspiration. (Of course, the author was a devout Catholic!)

Good luck with the project. Thomas Jefferson once undertook to edit the New Testament and remove all the impossibilities and the hatred. What was left, as he said, "stood out like diamonds in a dung-heap." It was mostly the fatuous advice given in the Sermon on the Mount, minus the hell-fire. It's a very short book, published as The Jefferson Bible.

I downloaded a copy, I'm going to read it. Thanks

I know there is a thread for discussions about the flood, but I want to keep my observations about the Bible in one place, so I'm posting this here.

Genesis: Chapters 6, 7 and 8 The Flood
Begins with mention that there were “daughters of men” who “men” took to wives, possibly to explain what wives were. At this point there is no mention of marriage and promising to stay with each other forever.
He is instructed by God to build a boat out of “gopher” wood.
There is no way to determine what the wood was that Noah was instructed to use. There are many suggestions and suppositions because there is no such thing as “gopher wood” and then there is this to explain the “pitch” which leads me to believe it was pine wood that is suggested for the building.

So how did they make pitch before the growth of the petroleum and coal industries? Their first step was to obtain resin from the pine trees which at that time grew in dense forests throughout Europe. A herringbone pattern of cuts was gouged into the tree trunk and as the resin ran down the grooves it was collected in a pot at the base of the tree. Pine resin is still collected in this way in Poland, the Ukraine, Russia, Finland and other European countries where pine forests are still to be found.
When the resin had finished flowing, the trees were chopped down, covered in soil or ash, and burned slowly to produce a lightweight black pure form of carbon called charcoal. The last step in the process of making pitch was to add the powdered charcoal to the boiling pine resins. Different proportions of charcoal would produce pitch of different properties. It was this pitch which was used to waterproof the large ocean-going wooden ships. In my opinion it is no coincidence that pitch today can be extracted from coal much of which in Australia shows evidence of having been formed from pine tree debris.
Now while I cannot say for sure that Noah obtained pitch for the ark exactly in this fashion, it does illustrate that you don’t have to be able to extract either oil or coal from the ground in order to make pitch. Anyone who had cut down as many trees as Noah and his helpers for the manufacture of an ocean-going ark would certainly have found out about tree resins. If Europeans had a well known and widely used method of making pitch before the discovery of petroleum, obviously Noah could also have had the same satisfactory way of waterproofing the ark with its covering of pitch.

http://creation.com/the-pitch-for-noahs-ark

15. The length of the ark shall be 350 cubits (350 x 18 inches i.e. 160 metres) the breadth of it 50 cubits, (50 x 18 inches i.e. 22 metres) and the height of it 30 cubits (30 x 18 inches i.e. 13.7 metres).

a great big boat for four old men to build, and in a very short time, but a really small boat when you consider what has to go onto this vessel.

16 18 inches square window, only one. and a door in the side with a ground floor and two above it.

The water when it settles is 6.8 metres in depth.

In the text before the flood description there is mention of the age of men being 120 years., bearing mind that Noah is living and he is already around 600 years old. His sons are over 100 years old already and he is to build the ark at that age?

Also, looking at my earlier chart, Lamech and Methuselah were still alive. Genesis 5 mentions their ages and that they lived until after the flood, so where we they, and why didn’t they help build the ark. There is nothing said about them, and their wives. Also Chapter 5 says they had other “sons and daughters” were all of these included in the flood, are they “evil” and “corrupted” and what exactly is “evil and corrupted” it doesn’t say.

Here are some logistics to consider.
The animals have been mentioned many times before in other discussions, so I won’t go into too much of the improbabilities about them here, except to mention the obvious ones.

Moses was supposed to have written this story.
If he did, how did he know about ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ animals before they’d been defined.
The definition of what is a clean and an unclean animal is not put before this story, so it must be assumed that Noah didn’t know about them.
Abraham comes after Noah, he made the trip out of the land of the “Chaldeans” after Noah’s flood, so the laws about animals didn’t exist at this time. Also the people of the area, i.e. the Fertile Crescent which is where the story originally came from, didn’t have different ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ laws about eating. There is no mention of these animals in their stories.
We know about the animals with special needs, panda (bamboo), koala (eucalyptus) and what about meat for the carnivores? There is no mention about extra animals to feed the carnivores for over a year. It does mention food, if the animals are eating there is all the waste. There is no way to collect water for the animals and people to drink, only a small window no access through the door, so how do they feed the animals, keep them watered, exercised and restrained. And how do they cope with mountains of excrement.

Also how do they keep all the food fresh. Four months of food which becomes a year? We know that sailors on long trips on the first voyages of exploration died of scurvy and that they developed other diseases related to malnutrition and those trips took around three months and they had access to rain water and fresh air and exericse. Lack of exercise for humans, especially 600 year old ones, would lead to loss of muscle tone and bone mass. Maybe the exercise was all the shit shovelling they did. But with the door and window closed, where did they pile up the poop?

By the time the rain stops, after 4 months, a few more months go by while the water dries up.
In this time there is no mention of the rotting food, the mountains of poop, the multiplying of insects (flies for instance can produce a whole colony in a day). A year of flies in mountains of poop, and the smell, the flies and the disease would be horrific.

But what about all the other animals, with short gestation periods. The elephants wouldn’t have had babies but all the other animals would have reproduced, how did they provide food for what would now be billions of insects and small animals? Remembering that he didn’t open the window until he sent the raven and then the dove out, where did their fresh air come from?

All that air filled with methane from untold tons of animal and human excrement would’ve killed them in no time at all.

Then it speaks about the water “covering the earth” up to 6.8 metres. That’s nothing. It wouldn’t have covered the mountains, it says it covered the mountains. Not true. And if it did, where did it run off to?

The best part of course is that not only were they able to walk off the ark onto fertile land covered with leaf-bearing olive trees, within less than a year of them being wiped out, they then proceed to slaughter animals to sacrifice to the deity that killed off all their living ancestors and siblings. Note, not the “unclean” animals that they don’t eat, but the “clean” ones that they need for food.

I’m not a scientist, just a lay person interested in dissecting the nonsense written in this book, and that people accept as “truth” and all I find is improbabilities in this the first of the great stories.

I was able to logically explain the Garden of Eden and the creation, and the vision of talking snakes, and what the original sin really was, but this is beyond me. It is not even good fiction.
All this story does for me is to confirm yet again that this was written during the exile in Babylon and that it was an attempt to steal the Gilgamesh flood story from the Persians.

If you want to read the story: http://wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM

Agrippina wrote:

johnbrandt wrote:I remember hearing someone trying to reason out the ludicrous life spans in the old testament saying that perhaps the "1000 year" lifespans were actually "1000 moons", which works out to about 83 years...? 900 years would be a far more believeable 900 moons, or 75 years.

Of course this doesn't work with the shorter ones, does it...

No it doesn't and 60+ years is a stretch as well. People around 3000 BCE, i.e. ordinary people living in the desert would not have lived for more than 40 years at the most.

Ah, but you forget the water canopy, which protected us from radiation and allowed our ancestors to live hundreds of years. Such a pity that the generation of Noah lost this precious resource for us. Now we suffer all that harmful UV radiation and live less than a century.

Roger Cooke wrote:

Agrippina wrote:

johnbrandt wrote:I remember hearing someone trying to reason out the ludicrous life spans in the old testament saying that perhaps the "1000 year" lifespans were actually "1000 moons", which works out to about 83 years...? 900 years would be a far more believeable 900 moons, or 75 years.

Of course this doesn't work with the shorter ones, does it...

No it doesn't and 60+ years is a stretch as well. People around 3000 BCE, i.e. ordinary people living in the desert would not have lived for more than 40 years at the most.

Ah, but you forget the water canopy, which protected us from radiation and allowed our ancestors to live hundreds of years. Such a pity that the generation of Noah lost this precious resource for us. Now we suffer all that harmful UV radiation and live less than a century.

No, there are more long-life stories after the Flood, more and more generations of them in fact, although the lifespans seem to be getting less and less as the story approaches Noah's father, Terah, now it's around 100 years.



Some more:

Chapter 10
A litany of the generations of Noah’s descendants and supposedly how the people of the Near East came to be where they were. It says that the people of Akkad, Neneveh, and the Philistines were all descended from Noah. My graphic above shows some of the places where the descendants of Noah were supposed to have settled.
Here’s an observation, again more proof that this book was probaably written in Babylon and not by Moses while he was travelling from Egypt to Canaan: He wouldn’t have known of the Philistines and all the various people of Persia who came after the Hebrews had supposedly settled in the “Promised Land” that Nineveh and Asshur, the cities of the Assyrians are mentioned, two things of importance emerge, 1) the people of Assur (Assyrians) were called that because they worshipped the god Ashur and not God, and secondly, the people who’d been living in Egypt and supposedly working as slaves building pyramids for the Egyptians would not know the details of the descendants of Noah, not unless they had story-tellers who had memories of the history told to them.

And some more (I've taken some liberty with changing the text here):
Two important events in Chapter 11:
The tower of Babel, here is my rewrite:

Chapter 11
1 Everyone spoke the same languge.
2 On a journey from the East, they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they lived there.
3 They made bricks and used slime for mortar.
4 They decided to build a city and a tower, high enough to reach the sky, and took a name so that they would know each other when they were scattered.
5 God took a look at the city and the tower.
6 God spoke to the other deities of his jealousy, he said, “look at these men, they behave like gods, building a city and a high tower.”
7 “Let’s go down there and confuse their speech.”
8 The people became confused because they couldn’t understand each other so they split up.
9 The city was called Babel because they were unable to understand each other.

This is the first instance of a display of the pettiness of the God that believers worship. His followers show some enterprise in building themselves a skyscraper and, instead of being excited about his children’s achievement,he makes mischief.

The next important event is the departure of Terah, Abraham’s father with Abraham, his nephew Lot (Lot was Haran's son by his wife Milcah) and Lot and Abraham’s wife Sarah.
They leave “Ur of the Chaldees” another anachronism which indicates a Babylon connection because the Chaldean empire didn’t exist at this time. The leave to go to a new place which they name “Haran.”

Ur: Note the place in the bottom right-hand corner of the map.
http://cumulus.planetess.com/Eden/ch8.htg/Ur1.jpg

Then note the date of the existence of the Chaldean Empire on this map.

Are you guys still interested in this?
I've uncovered an interesting bit about Abraham that I can either post as a short piece or the three chapters that cover the build-up to Sodom and Gomorrah. WHich would you prefer?

Of course we're interested. Great job Aggie.