Andrew's Rants.

REVELATIONS FROM THE SHOWER

As many of you know I recently became an ordained clergy person in the Church of Spiritual Humanism. It was done as a lark on a whim. I paid them 60 dollars and received the title of Reverend Father. As I began to think about this I realized that perhaps even as a joke it might be a bit sacrilegious and decided to actually study the bible a bit more and try to understand my own chosen religion. It seems every morning that while I am in the shower under the scalding water as my brain is jolted awake I do my best thinking. Eyes closed against the sting of soap I ponder the nuances of what I read the evening before as I prepared for sleep. I read late night in bed much to my wife’s annoyance. Anyway I begin to look at what I read from different angles and examine it from not only a spiritual point of view but also a scientific perspective. Now this doesn’t mean that if science cannot explain something it is not real or has no relevance. Science is just a tool of logic and experience to help one understand something by providing a logical frame of reference. When it can’t do that then you need to learn more so that you can understand. That is why science is always expanding, growing, and developing new theories and revealing new information. As I said just because you can't explain something with science doesn’t make it not so. It just means that you can’t explain it yet but it’s still real. That’s where faith comes into play. Sometimes you just have to believe for the sake of the belief alone.
Anyway as I stood there under the water stream the other morning I thought about Noah and his arc. We read in the bible how the entire world was covered with water and it rained for 40 days and nights. We know now that there is not enough water on earth to cover the entire surface even if all the liquid trapped as ice at the Polar Regions was melted. Although it would certainly go a long way towards flooding every low-lying coastal region. If you look at most civilizations they grew up around natural water sources like rivers or lakes or oceans. Easy access is necessary for any beginning society not only for drinking but agriculture and transportation. We do know without a doubt that there was a catastrophe in the dim historical past that caused massive flooding. It is recorded around the world in many different civilizations records independent of each other. Many scientist now think it was a case of plate shifting in which the continents will shift across the surface of the molten core of the earth in a sudden gestalt movement that happens every 40 thousand years or so. It seems that the idea of slow plate movement is a fallacy of erroneous thinking and that in a matter of hours the entire earth shifts its magnetic poles as the surface continents swirled around. It sounds too incredible to be true but it is. We can see the evidence in rock formations where magnetic north will change by sometimes as much as 180 degrees in a matter of a week. Einstein theorized that this shifting was caused by ice building up at the poles. As it snows and ice is added each year the ice pack grows larger and larger. Eventually the amount of water trapped as ice at the poles is so out of proportion to the earth’s balance that something has to give and the planet self corrects. In this instance the very crust shifts on its liquid base. Suddenly what was a tropical jungle is now the North Pole. It explains a lot that plagued scientist for many years. Like why under the Antarctic ice there is a lush tropical jungle 400 feet down frozen solid or why they can dig up frozen mammoths with food still in their mouths but just freeze dried in mid chew. From the current theories the climate would have gone from sub tropical to 180 below freezing in less than 2 hours. This would \cause all the water trapped as ice to melt rapidly over a period of months and the condensate would cause terrible storms that would rearrange weather patterns for years. Remember Ethiopia used to be the Garden of Eden, now look at it. It has also been theorized that this event which occurred last about 25000 years ago was responsible for the overflow of the ocean at the Gibraltar straights which caused the small land bridge to give way and flood the entire area now known as the Mesopotamian sea. It is widely proven that under this sea are hundreds of villages and some massive cities that were deluged with water and covered literally overnight. They are our best source of archeological treasures from that time period. Cities like Troy that were thought to have been a myth entirely have been unearthed along with Rhodes Helike and major portions of Alexandria. Some are so old they do not even have names or historical references. If you were living in this low lying area and suddenly it began to rain and the world filled with water from horizon to horizon then certainly to your frame of reference the world was flooded. What I find truly amazing is the stories that come from other great cultures. In many ways, so similar, yet also unique. Take Hawaii, for instance. Before Christian influence, they seem to have had a story about the great flood -- the Kai-a-ka-hina-li’i -- which left two people stranded on top of the peak of Mauna Kea. Then there is the story from the Peruvian Incas. When two shepherd brothers were warned by their llamas that a great flood was coming, they hid away in a great cave. As it rained and the floodwaters rose, the mountain in which they were hiding kept growing higher and kept them above the flood. After the flood, the shepherds and their families repopulated the Earth, but the llamas always preferred to stay in the highlands because they remembered the flood. Smart llamas! The Aztec, who had a myth about the great flood before the Europeans arrived with their version, believed that Tata and Nena were saved because they were instructed to hollow out a great log for a boat. In Greece, the son of Prometheus -- Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, were placed in a large wooden chest. They landed on Mount Parnassus after the flood, which was caused when it rained for nine days and nine nights. Many people think the bible is the oldest record of the flood but you must remember that writing was around thousands of years before the first book of the bible was ever penned. Others erroneously think that the story of Gilgamesh is the earliest written tale but once again they are wrong. Gilgamesh even refers in its latter chapters to a man known as Utnaphistim.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the story of King Gilgamesh of Uruk who oppresses his people. As punishment, the gods send him a companion, Enkidu, who is his mirror image and becomes his good friend. Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu defy the gods by killing the giant Humbaba, cutting down the sacred cedar forest which he guards, and killing the Bull of Heaven. Enkidu has ominous dreams of the destiny of tyrants who become slaves in the House of Death. Enkidu finally dies of an illness sent by the gods. Horrified by Enkidu's death and the prospect of his own demise, Gilgamesh undertakes a quest for immortality, which brings him to the abode of Utnapishtim, a virtuous man who obeys the gods and was saved by them from the Great Flood. Utnapishtim puts Gilgamesh to various tests, which he fails and eventually sends him away, assuring him that he cannot escape death. A humbled Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and orders his story to be inscribed in stone. To Gilgamesh Utnapishtim was an ancient tale already from their dim past. It was most likely passed down by word of mouth until it was finally written down the first time most likely in cuneiform characters on clay tablets some of which were found at Nippúr in Mesopotamia and dating back to around 4,000 BC; The most common copy is based on the 12-tablet Akkadian version of the poem found in the 25,000-tablet library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC) at Niniveh.

I guess my point to all this flood business is that just because it’s in the bible doesn’t mean it’s the unquestioned absolute only story. I’m not saying it’s wrong but that it has to be viewed from the perspective of the writer. In the era in which the bible was written they had different views on many things than we do now days. An excellent example of this is the council of Trent of 1545 in which several books of the bible were edited out simply because they did not agree with the formal view point of the church at the time. They eliminated any reference to females of power or any situation that questioned the total authority of the church over daily life and finances. It has been shown that the version we most commonly use as our standard version the King James is a far cry from the original copies found on the Dead Sea scrolls. Political Power struggles and basic human greed, along with normal mistakes and errors have changed the content of our holiest book away from what it originally was intended to be. In fact you can buy a copy of the bible with the edited books restored. They are called the books of the Apocrypha. The Catholic Church recognizes them but will not canonize them.

So back to the flood I know this is all disjointed but you gotta remember its happening in the shower. Thoughts sorta washing down the drain so to speak. Sure a flood happened. No I don’t think it covered the world. Noah most likely built a big barge and put all his livestock on it. No he didn’t put two of every animal on it. First of all for viable breeding stock you need a set of at least 7 non-related chromosomes strands to avoid the Hapsburg effect and run into reciprocity of DNA and stacking of genetic defects. Second to hold two of every animal and their feed and accessories would require a ship the size of an aircraft carrier. It just didn’t happen. I think Noah took the barnyard animals when the yard began to flood and they made a safe get away. To him those were all the animals in the world anyway. Do you think he had ever seen a koala bear or hippo? Try putting a mad rhino in a wooden stall for a month. Trust me you wouldn’t have much of a ship left after that. Yes I think God told Noah to prepare for a flood and that is based purely on faith. I also think God warned many other people in many other countries around the world and helped them survive. If he didn’t we would all look Middle Eastern and that is just not the case. Thank God for that because I don’t think I could handle not bathing and wearing goat sweat as an aftershave. Perhaps the Christians just had better PR than a lot of the other religions. Perhaps they are all valid to some extent. But that is a shower for another time.