http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City

Emirical evidence that NYC is a real place that actually exists.
Therefore, Ghostbusters is a true story.

Silence of the Lambs was based on a true story. That doesn't mean the events in Silence of the Lambs actually happened as depicted. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either a fool or completely out of touch with reality.

That is what is going here.

Let me clear it up for you, Submittard. The "acclaimed maritime archeologists" say that there were local floods that gave rise to various myths. The "fundamentalist Christian nut jobs" say that there was a flood that covered the entire world, wiped out everyone on earth except 8 multi hundred year old people, and explains everything that makes the earth look older than 6000 years, including the Grand Canyon.

So that's the minor difference there.

make me some tea: Um, welcome to 1995?

This is not news. It's interesting, but this it's been posited that the Black Sea was once dry land for at least 15 years now.

Hell, the Mediterranean used to be dry land. The flood when the Atlantic broke through at Gibraltar would be epic to go back and watch.

I have a hobby - I enjoy deconstructing every biblical tale into a more reasonable tale that could have feasibly happened, but was embellished greatly over the years.

Noah's Ark? Some dude with a boat saved two of his sheep during a flood, then used them to replenish his herd.

David and Goliath? This one doesn't even need deconstructing. A little guy killed a big guy by hitting him in the head with a rock thrown at high speeds.

Every cycle of "punishment" and "restoration" of the Hebrew people? Pretty common "we got our shiat kicked only because WE WEREN'T PIOUS ENOUGH!" See: The entire republican party, November 7th.

Moses? A crazy guy who knew a single path over a river incited a riot, ran away with a bunch of slaves, the people who pursued him didn't know the path over the river, got killed chasing them.

Mary? Uh, yeah. Do I really need to point out that it's far more likely one stupid had his wife cheat on him, then lie about it, rather than the motherfarking almighty swooping down to impregnate some random chick?

/this is why my family stopped sending me bibles for christmas.

Waldo Pepper: Lionel Mandrake: Waldo Pepper: it is amazing for a bunch of folks who don't believe in God and the Bible just how much time is spent whining about it.

Not really...it is amazing how so many people who think it's the divine word of God know absolutely nothing about it, but still believe it over science.

my statement is about non believing farkers spending so much time and effort whining about God and the Bible. I have no belief in aliens from other planets, astrology etc, etc and I spend zero of my time whining about these beliefs

So you only spend time whining about what others believe. Got it.

When I was a kid, a serial killer broke into my house and murdered my entire family with an axe. He got away.

Now, at random times throughout the year, he sends me postcards.

the postcards say "Next time I won't use an axe."


And that's how I feel about rainbows.

King Something: In order for penguins, elephants, poison dart frogs, møøse, honey badgers, polar bears, panda bears, panthers, ocelots, Iriomote cats, Gila monsters, Komodo dragons, Galapagos tortoises, Tasmanian devils and duck-billed platypi to have survived the Flood, they must have first been herded onto the Ark. Those animals are generally not found in the Middle East, nor is there much record of them in any historical documents from the region.

Honey Badger can't be found in the Middle East? Honey Badger don't care. Honey badger don't give a shiat.

Now this really pisses me off. I have a bachelors in Historical Anthropology and let me let you in on a little secret that we in the archaeological community have known since the 20's. Biblical "Archaeology" has absolutely no basis in reality. Its a bunch of true believers trying to prove that their religion and by extension their god is real. Not for nothing but Bob Ballard, Simcha Jocobovici, Jim Cameron and the other dumbasses who try to "prove" this nonsense are not in fact archaeologists.Their opinions, assertions and conclusions have no more validity or credibility than the average layman. Bob Ballard has a degree in Marine Biology, Jim Cameron's is in film and Simcha Jocobovici's is in Journalism. These idiot shills know little more than you can pick up watching the History channel. If these guys had discovered anything worth mentioning why have none received honorary doctorates in Anthropology? (standard practice when a non-vocational archaeologist makes a discovery of any, and I mean any importance) They don't and they never will because things like the John ossuary, the biblical flood and the resting place of Jesus are either fakes or sensationalized to the point of invalidity, as is the case here. But then again the goal of these people is not to uncover truth or fact but to get fat christian hausfraus to tune in to their latest 44 minute infomercial for stupidity.

Posting before reading comments as I haven't yet added the dash of gin to my tea which would up my patience threshold, and I'm sure it's already been covered but what the hell....

Nobody is disputing that there was, or at least may certainly very well have been a local massive flood in the Middle East around the time that the Biblical story is said to have happened. In fact, It's highly likely that there was given that's how legends and myths start. However, having some basis in historical truth does not automatically mean that the mythologised version of events happened exactly as described.
Biblical literalists claiming that the whole world was covered in water because the Bible says so seem to forget that after the flood the Bible says that the whole world was completely dry.

I'll go get that dash of gin and read the thread now.....

Magorn: "based on real events" is not the same as "actually happened"

Ballard has mor eor less conclusively proved there was a catastrophic flood that brought the water of the Med into the black sea. The Black Sea's unusual composition, salt water on top, fresh water farther down really can't be easily explained any other way. Morevover, I personally believe that the reason almost every culture on earth has a "flood story" is because there WERE catastrophic global floods all over the world, just not all at once the way the bible tells it. Go look at a map of Ice Age Europe and then look at it again after the glaciers melted. The English channel, for example used to be a land bridge. Futher We know people lived on that land bridge becuase, just like Ballard did in the Black Sea, we've found evidence of villages and human habitations at the bottom of the channel. So yeah, since people do tend to live near the water (look at a poulation map of the world even today) and the water levels dramatically rose over a few hundred year stretch. I have no doubt it was traumatic experience for nearly every human on earth and was enshrined in all sorts of story-telling traditions

The fact that "the Flood" shows up in all sorts of traditions proves to a fundamentalist friend of mine that the Bible must be true, because so much of it is corroborated. He can never explain how it's the other things corroborating the Bible and not vice-versa, though...

ABC News: BIBLE IS REAL STORIES!
Noted Archaeologist: Floods in the area may have inspired the legend of Noah's biblical flood.

My 2¢: when you live in a 15km radius for your entire prehistory life, any serious flood is going to seem like the end of the world.

Hollie Maea: (wall of text to come)

After you paste...did you know that you can still make your own paragraphs?
Give it a try next time.

Acclaimed maritime archeologists can also be fundamentalist christian nutjobs. There is no reason for you, Subby, or anyone else to consider the two titles mutually exclusive.

Waldo Pepper: I have no belief in aliens from other planets

If you voted for Romney, you voted for someone who actually worships an alien from another planet.

Waldo Pepper: Seems our founding fathers and forefathers were pretty smart to base our laws on the Bible

Compare and contrast the First Commandment with the First Amendment.
And then apologize to everybody here for being so dumb.

Headline is dishonest (big surprise). It's not so much "Noah's flood actually happened" as it is, "A big flood might've happened around that time and might've later inspired different myths."

Kibbler: So...water levels were twenty-five thousand feet higher than they are today?

If I recall, the Bible doesn't mention any ice age. I wonder why, hmm, what could possibly be the reason, it's almost as if a bunch of desert nomads didn't know there were ice ages because they were desert nomads.

But somehow they knew where to put the penguins after the water level dropped.

The Black Sea flood is an old story. They were finding wooden buildings preserved in the anoxic layers of the Black Sea over a decade ago.

vharshyde: Let's look at the physics, shall we? In order for a flood to occur, water has to come from one place and be distributed to another place. So let's look at this.

9 inches/hr is one of the highest rainfall records I've seen thus far. So let's do the math. Over a 40 day period at 24 hours per day(40 days and 40 nights, as they say), that leaves a total deposit of 720 feet. Not a small number, but wait, there's more. That comes down to about .13 miles in depth. Which is still pretty nasty. However, for that to be global, here's what that would come out to.

The total landmass of earth = 57,308,738 square miles...
Total depth of water = .13 miles...
Assuming a flat earth(To give us a much better round-down, so this number should be MUCH higher, but I'm too lazy to do spherical volumes here), it would leave us with roughly 7.8 million cubic miles of water.

So let's break that down into gallons.

One gallon of water is roughly 7.48 cubic feet.
The total cubic miles listed above gives us... 1,148,144,025,600 cubic feet of water.
Which would translate to roughly 153,495,190,588 Gallons of water. Which I would estimate that in order to create that volume of clouds(Constant, as well), which would require direct sunlight on every major water source, and only clouds over every land mass for a 40 day period, would require a very sudden rise in energy as received by the surface of the planet, on ALL sides, a shifting of major wind channels and currents, and the like. Which wouldn't work out so well for the science of it all.

But that number above... Just above a tenth of a mile in depth... That should have some level of significance, shouldn't it?

There's also the teensy problem of increased air pressure, which would have popped Noah and his clan like water balloons.

Let's look at the physics, shall we? In order for a flood to occur, water has to come from one place and be distributed to another place. So let's look at this.

9 inches/hr is one of the highest rainfall records I've seen thus far. So let's do the math. Over a 40 day period at 24 hours per day(40 days and 40 nights, as they say), that leaves a total deposit of 720 feet. Not a small number, but wait, there's more. That comes down to about .13 miles in depth. Which is still pretty nasty. However, for that to be global, here's what that would come out to.

The total landmass of earth = 57,308,738 square miles...
Total depth of water = .13 miles...
Assuming a flat earth(To give us a much better round-down, so this number should be MUCH higher, but I'm too lazy to do spherical volumes here), it would leave us with roughly 7.8 million cubic miles of water.

So let's break that down into gallons.

One gallon of water is roughly 7.48 cubic feet.
The total cubic miles listed above gives us... 1,148,144,025,600 cubic feet of water.
Which would translate to roughly 153,495,190,588 Gallons of water. Which I would estimate that in order to create that volume of clouds(Constant, as well), which would require direct sunlight on every major water source, and only clouds over every land mass for a 40 day period, would require a very sudden rise in energy as received by the surface of the planet, on ALL sides, a shifting of major wind channels and currents, and the like. Which wouldn't work out so well for the science of it all.

But that number above... Just above a tenth of a mile in depth... That should have some level of significance, shouldn't it?

A few problems here. First off, the book mentions the Mountains of Ararat. However, these mountains are in entirely the wrong geographic direction from the supposed launch point, so that's done with(Raleigh went into this). In fact, Raleigh contended that the mountains in question must have been the taller peaks out towards Asia. And coming to rest on the top of the mountains in that area? .13 of a mile wouldn't even get you close.

So...water levels were twenty-five thousand feet higher than they are today?

If I recall, the Bible doesn't mention any ice age. I wonder why, hmm, what could possibly be the reason, it's almost as if a bunch of desert nomads didn't know there were ice ages because they were desert nomads.

I caught a minnow. I said I caught a Barracuda. An ichthyologist confirms that I caught a minnow. This confirms my story.

In other news, provincial sheepherders view local events as having global scope - and then they write a book about them.

Waldo Pepper: it is amazing for a bunch of folks who don't believe in God and the Bible just how much time is spent whining about it.

The most powerful country on earth bases most of its laws on interpretations of the bible. So yeah it affect people.

"In the early chapters of Genesis, people live 800 years, 700 years, 900 years," said Rabbi Burt Visotzky, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. "Those are mythic numbers, those are way too big. We don't quite know what to do with that.

Stop trying to interpret the text as a historical document and the problem goes away.

GAT_00: Hell, the Mediterranean used to be dry land. The flood when the Atlantic broke through at Gibraltar would be epic to go back and watch.

Maybe not so epic. But still cool.

A regional flood event that spawned enduring oral myths that became the Epic of Gilgamesh and eventually rewritten and included in the bible as Noah and the Ark is now being explored in a ABC TV special with Christiane Amanpour and the guy who sent robots down into the Titanic a couple years back?

Meh, prolly more interesting than one of those "Did we just find the Ark?" ones I suppose.

Magorn: "based on real events" is not the same as "actually happened"

Ballard has mor eor less conclusively proved there was a catastrophic flood that brought the water of the Med into the black sea. The Black Sea's unusual composition, salt water on top, fresh water farther down really can't be easily explained any other way. Morevover, I personally believe that the reason almost every culture on earth has a "flood story" is because there WERE catastrophic global floods all over the world, just not all at once the way the bible tells it. Go look at a map of Ice Age Europe and then look at it again after the glaciers melted. The English channel, for example used to be a land bridge. Futher We know people lived on that land bridge becuase, just like Ballard did in the Black Sea, we've found evidence of villages and human habitations at the bottom of the channel. So yeah, since people do tend to live near the water (look at a poulation map of the world even today) and the water levels dramatically rose over a few hundred year stretch. I have no doubt it was traumatic experience for nearly every human on earth and was enshrined in all sorts of story-telling traditions



The largest waterfall ever to have existed came over this ledge. The Missoula floods would have been awesome to behold.

And yet, no one calls them "global." Because, you know, they were "regional."