Archaeologica.org

encourages people to think that science is just guesswork or worse

The reason why people worry about Creationism in its various guises is that it is fundamentally anti-science

If Americans turn away from science America will become a third world country

If Korea had done that it wouldn't be as advanced and modern a country as it has become

Cortez?

The Inquisition

Hitler?

Osama bin Laden?

God-fearing pioneers that butchered Native Americans

archaeologist wrote:

Cortez?

---catholic

The Inquisition

--catholic

Hitler?

--not a believer in Christ

Osama bin Laden?

--muslim, not a believer in Christ

read the books of I,II,III John and you will see what is required of a believer

God-fearing pioneers that butchered Native Americans

--these people would not be considered christian especially according to the new testament.

not everyone who says they are a believer truly is one and to hold their actions against Christ, given the factor of freedom of choice, is just wrong.

archaeologist wrote:not everyone who says they are a believer truly is one and to hold their actions against Christ, given the factor of freedom of choice, is just wrong.

Many American books, television documentaries, and Sunday sermons that preach of Hitler's "evil" have eliminated Hitler's god for their Christian audiences, but one only has to read from his own writings to appreciate that Hitler's God equals the same God of the Christian Bible. Hitler held many hysterical beliefs which not only include, God and Providence but also Fate, Social Darwinism, and ideological politics. He spoke, unashamedly, about God, fanaticism, idealism, dogma, and the power of propaganda. Hitler held strong faith in all his convictions. He justified his fight for the German people and against Jews by using Godly and Biblical reasoning. Indeed, one of his most revealing statements makes this quite clear:

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

Many have questioned Hitler's stand on Christianity. Although he fought against certain Catholic priests who opposed him for political reasons, his belief in God and country never left him. Many Christians throughout history have opposed Christian priests for various reasons; this does not necessarily make one against one's own Christian beliefs. Nor did the Vatican's Pope & bishops ever disown him; in fact they blessed him! As evidence to his claimed Christianity, he said:

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

It can't be objective because he doesn't grasp the science behind the theory of evolution that well.

And it isn't just fossils, evolution is happening today and we have seen new species develop

As with Hitler, who thought he was a Christian

The last I heard, Roman Catholics were Christian

As a matter of fact, Hitler sounds like every evangelical Christian I've ever talked to.

Arch is obviously ignorant of Protestant atrocities during the Reformation.

Anyone want to get back on topic?

I figured if we gave you enought rope. You have finally proved just how ignorant you really are.

DougWeller wrote:Anyone want to get back on topic?

In the Epic of Gilgamesh we read:-

The weather to look at was full of forboding,
I went into the boat and sealed my hatch.
To the one who sealed the boat, Puzur-Enlil the shipwright,
I gave my palace with all its goods.

At the very first glimmer of brightening dawn,
There rose on the horizon a dark cloud of black,
And bellowing within it was Adad the Storm God.
The gods Shullat and Hanish were going before him,
Bearing his throne over mountain and land.

The god Errakal was uprooting the mooring-poles,
Ninurta, passing by, made the weirs overflow.
Tha Annunaki gods carried torches of fire,
Scorching the country with brilliant flashes.

The stillness of the Storm God passed over the sky,
And all that was bright then turned to darkness.
[He] charged the land like a bull [on the rampage].
He smashed [it] in [pieces [like a vessel of clay]

For a day the gale [winds flattened the country],
Quickly they blew, and [then came] the [Deluge].
Like a battle [the cataclysm] passed over the people.
One man could nor discern another,
Nor could people be recognised amid the destruction.

~ ~ ~

For six days and [seven] nights
There blew the wind, the downpour,
The gale, the Deluge, it flattened the land.

Cut the seventh day when it came,
The gate relented, the Deluge ended.
The ocean grew calm, that had thrashed like a woman in labour
The tempest grew still, the Deluge ended.

I looked at the weather, it was quiet and still,
But all the people had turned to clay.
The flood plain was flat like the roof of a house.
I opened a vent, on my cheeks fell the sunlight.

Down sat I, I knelt and I wept,
Down my cheeks the tears were coursing.
I scanned the horizons, the edge of the ocean,
In fourteen places there rose an island.

On the mountain of Nimush the boat ran aground

(The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Poem and other texts in Akkadian and Sumerian, translated by Andrew George, Penquin 1999. )



What are the effects of a tropical cyclone? And how well do they match the account given in the Atrahasis and Gilgamesh sagas?

According to Arthur N Strahler and Alan H Strahler, in Modern Physical Geography (John Wiley & Sons 1978):-

The environmental importance of tropical cyclones lies in their tremendously destructive effect on inhabited islands and coasts. Wholesale destruction of cities and their inhabitants has been reported on several occasions…..

Coastal destruction by storm waves and greatly raised sea level is perhaps the most serious effect of tropical cyclones. Where water level is raised by strong wind pressure, great storm surf attacks ground ordinarily far inland of the limits of wave action. A sudden rise of water level, known as a storm surge, may take place as the hurricane moves over a coastline. Ships are lifted and carried inland to become stranded….. At the mouth of the Hooghly River on the Bay of Bengal, 300,000 persons died as a result of inundation by a 12m (40ft) storm surge that accompanied a severe tropical cyclone in 1737

Important, too, is the large quantity of rainfall produced by tropical cyclone. A considerable part of the summer rainfall of some coastal regions can be traced to a few such storms. Although this rainfall is a valuable water resource, it may prove a menace as a producer of unwanted river floods…..

Sounds familiar?

When we couple this with the scenes we have all witnessed on TV in recent years of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch in Central America – an event that was described at the time as knocking Guatemala back to the stone age, and the collosal flooding suffered by Mozambique in 2002 we start to have an idea how such an event some 5,000 years ago may well have seemed like the end of the world, and become enshrined in folklore ever since…..

Of course, the Persian Gulf does not normally experience such storms nowadays, though, it is not too far north of the occasional track of tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea. But 5,000 years ago the Earth’s climate was different. The Hypsithermal had ended, the Intertropical Convergence Zone was shifting southwards, leading to the drying up of the Sahara and much of the Middle East. Antarctic sea ice was growing, variation in ENSO become stronger and more frequent.

Maybe there was a series of severe El Nino events, leading to widespread drought, famine and disease (as described in the Mesopotamian myths as precceding the 'flood') in an area that was already experiencing a reduction in seasonal rainfall. And then this was followed by a rare tropical cyclone – perhaps carried up into the Persian Gulf by warmer than usual waters, themselves a consequence of El Nino - and the rest becomes history. Or, rather, myth…..

Whilst it is by no means conclusive that a tropical cyclone was the event that caused ‘Noah’s Flood’; there is no question that it could have occurred, and that such storms do closely match the events described in the Atrahasis and Gilgamesh stories.