Wow can’t believe r/atheism can make comics
On this week’s episode: Smug Atheist’s Unfunny Preachy Comic.
I kinda hate these types of comics. There really isn’t any reason why this should be a comic other than the writer’s medium of choice. The message gains nothing from the visual aspect. The comic could really have been improved if the author showed what the characters are talking about, but we just get a wall of text with a crudely drawn woman to represent the opposition. Also, the art has no appeal and is generally ugly.
Fun fact: all of the oldest recorded stories - in addition to the Torah there’s the Sumerian writings that are even older - have a story of a worldwide flood event.
The caveat being that to them, the “world” that was flooded was the Mesopotamian basin area. In the millennia since then, the known world has grown to encompass the entire planet, so the context informing our interpretation has shifted, and we need to expend proper effort to shift it back, to what they would have meant back then, not what it would mean to us today if similar words had been used, e.g. if the story were told in English.
The children’s story myth seems to have arisen from an irl event, just not the one that the picture books repeatedly show & tell (obviously for reasons of profit, they sell what people will buy and enjoy looking at, rather than focusing on historical accuracy).
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.
You don’t have to do anything, true. Feel free to completely disregard the Bible.
That being said, don’t pick up Lord of the Rings, ignore it’s genre and declare it pointless because Hobbits don’t exist. The Bible has so many genres, because its a collection of stories and books rather than a single book, and you probably aren’t aware of most of those genres because they no longer exist.
Again, feel free to completely ignore the Bible if you’d like, but saying that it’s a mistake for anyone to try and figure out what one of the most influential books in the history of mankind was originally intended to say is wrong.
Now you are muddling. There is a difference between studying the book as a piece of historical literature and saying it doesn’t say exactly what it says. If someone wants to waste as much time as I have doing that, they are welcome to. If someone wants to pretend it is NOT homophobic I will push back.
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
Allow me to be unnecessarily aggressive here, for the lolz obvi, by stating that yes, you do.:-) *I* did not make this comic, you were the one who chose to show it. *I* was not the one who started this conversation, you were. If you start something, then you need to be intellectually honest about whatever it is that you choose to discuss? Or else you, who has your rights, may get downvoted and talked back to by others, who likewise have their rights as well. Bury your head in the sand all you wish - and congrats btw for overcoming your false religious start in life - but if you are going to poke your head up and demand that your POV be considered by everyone who reads your posts on Lemmy, then by that self-same action you are choosing for it to be evaluated as well? That isn’t (just) me, it is the very nature of logic and reality that demands that! Otherwise, how is your POV any different than theirs? “I am right and you cannot question that!” - really?, that is the route that you want to go with here?
Be better.
Anyway, it’s a thought. Do what you want with it:-D.
And fwiw, Jesus hung out with “sinners” (literal prostitutes and stuff), and literally commanded (anyone who wants to claim to follow Him as a literal God) to “love one another, especially those you disagree with” so… even if this thought bugs you, you are actually “following the teachings of Christ” (heavy emphasis on that word teachings) more closely than the actual genocidal Christians who (mis-)use the other words in the same book to bludgeon people to (literal) death. Anyway, don’t fall down to their standards - I encourage you: choose to be better my fellow human being!:-) Don’t fall back into old patterns, just now on the other side! :-P (even if, as Jesus Himself literally has preemptively agreed with you, it may happen to be the correct one, at least insofar that regardless of what someone else chooses to do or not do, it is no reason to be ungentle with them, as you say it is better to “be nice”, is it not?:-D)
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.
Upvoting, b/c that too:-).
I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c “they made it up”, but b/c it actually did really happen… and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.
Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie “Knowing” with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie “The Matrix” did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.
Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe “the world-wide flood event” to a child, it would be both “yes it actually did happen” (most likely) plus also “it wasn’t quite like that”.
I don’t think you have to even assume that every Mesopotamian flood myth is referring to the same event. The Tigris and Euphrates were very prone to massive flooding.
The ark story doesn’t necessarily mean that all of sea level rise was result of rainfall.
Domino collapse of glaciers have been known to raise sea levels extremely quickly.
There was even a theory by a palentologist (which I cant currently find) of an ice dam left over from an ice age which separated two major parts of the ocean, which had different sea levels. When the ice dam eventually collapsed, the oceans would have reached equilibrium in a matter of days. Given the chaotic history of plate tectonics and ice ages, this isnt an unreasonable theory. Imagine if the mouth of the Mediterranean was frozen over, and the body evaporated down to lower levels, and people settled there. Then the ice wall collapsed.
Im not saying any of this explains a ridiculous bible story, just that, as a scientist, its short-sighted to assume rainfall was the only possible contributor to the flood.
“The world” back then also was something like a town and its surrounding villages. It probably just rained really heavy for a few days, flooded some village in a way that never happened before and the only explanation was “God’s wrath”.
I believe most of religious stories can be explained by people talking shit.
There was a flood after the meditteran salinity crysis, which happened partly due to lowered pressure in the nord causing the ground in the south to recede after the ice was gone (think of pressing in a balloon). There was a theory that the black sea flood (was half as big prior) due to this was what we know as the great flood, with humanity living mostly around there at the time, but i think it was refuted, because the flooding happened over generations there.
The thing with glacier seas happened mostly in scandinavia, gb, up there, creating the english channel (the heck? German it is Ärmelkanal).
There’s another, funner, theory, whereby a feedback loop in tectonic movement makes the plate boundaries heat up and the plates move ever faster (for a while till it calms down again). The ocean floor thereby becomes hot and more buoyant on the mantle beneath - so ocean floor rises and continents sink.
That theory is backed up by some proper plate simulation by a respected scientist, but as far as I know it was never developed past the initial simulation work and intriguing result.