The winds howl
The storm rages furious
Torrents of rain shatter
fragile windows
The two men look to each
other as one’s house falls and
the other’s stands.
The wise on the rock
the fool on the sands.
The old man howls
The old woman screams
To see their long life end
With shattered dreams.
Click for Water Statistics from Dripfina
Quietly He speaks – to my heart
In the middle – of the day
—–
And I would kiss my desire goodbye
Only for His love.
—–
There’s a time when God will open your
Heart and give you your desire
He’ll fill your heart
with lasting desire to do His work.
—–
You will be a sweet fragrance of life for the living
Death for the dying
A garden filled with choice aromatic flowers
through the living Christ.
—–
To catch a butterfly
You must be perfectly still
and fragrantly full
Let him alight on your lovely petals and
drink God’s nectar to the full.
No longer concealed
The cravings of a thousand ages come to pass
The Dragon’s fate is sealed
in horror he reeled
That snake in fire lake shall be cast
Time is running out
the Dragon’s tool is doubt
The battle for your soul is not quite done.
on a cold winter’s morning
when the snow covers all we see
Like a holy blanket of white purity
So the word of God covers
All our earthly parts.
on a cold winter’s morning
when the sap freezes in the tree
the branches go to sleep, no responsibility
So the word of God freezes all
our wicked ways
on a cold winter’s morning
when the water freezes on the lake
all the anxious waves cease their endless quake
So the word of God calms our
fears and dries our tears
on a cold winter’s morning
when the sun rises in the sky
its only a symbol of the long summer fry
So the word of God promises
Life that we will soon grow
on a cold winter’s morning
there are still berries on the tree
a hungry animal will eat them gladly
So the word of God in us
will feed a hungry soul
with the hope of eternal life
In the breaking of the day
The stars are put away
And the sun sends his rays through the clouds.
The flowers they bloom
And the earth makes room
For the shoots of grass rising to meet the dawn.
All the earth waits
And the sun anticipates
The meeting that is sure to come at dawn.
And I also wait
My life is an empty plate
For you to fill and feed my friends and I.
Once I understand
And find out who I am
I give my life determined on my cross.
You opened up my eyes
And made me realize
That in your death the sun begins to rise.
I think it is remarkable how divided the Christian world is. So much of what we believe has become important above and beyond any recognizable justifications.
This is less so for philosophy. Though in some places there is hot contention over some issues. In the USA the analytic school feels an obligation to destroy pragmatism. This is irritating to me, not because I am a doctrinaire pragmatist but because the attack is so wrongheaded and uncritical of the limits of its own views.
Religions have some of the same troubles, that is, if Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Shinto, or Buddhism etc. are true then on some account the others may not be. Some state that exclusive claim outright.
Politicians have the same difficulty. To win against an opponent, or other party, one must often go on the offensive even when the differences between views look like the differences between squabbling children, basically meaningless. If the differences were something between tyranny and anarchy, not that we would aim at either of those, we could tell the difference. Yes, there are differences in how an election will turn out, but nobody knows what will happen in the long run, Nobody knows whether a single bit of legislation will turn out to be valuable or destructive of social bonds. We are guessing with our best sense, but it is still a guess. If nothing else, we must follow Immanuel Kant’s advice not to make rules to bind future generations so that they could not make improvements.
With the Ken Ham and Bill Nye debate thoroughly over, but left with an unsettling taste, I had to say something.
OK I have some questions about the flood that I needed answered. An old student Trevor Cartwright brought up the Genesis account once more. Long ago I dismissed the possibility that Genesis was giving us a literal account of events in ancient history. But lingering questions remain. I am firmly convinced that God does not intend to deceive people by plain observation, and that human senses are generally reliable, especially with so many eyes on the same objects. Science does not give us absolute truth, but it does give us good probability, and human logic, though incomplete, does not deceive us as far as it goes.
So here it goes: The contention is about whether the flood is universal or local. I abandoned the prospect that it was global a long time ago because of the large number of species and the variety of species on different continents that did not seem to have known each other, and certainly not a mere 6000 years ago.
I don’t have a problem with thinking that the flood is local, and that the ancients thought the world to be very small. Here’s a rather recent map of Ptolemy’s from 105 AD, thousands of years after the supposed universal flood.
Ptolemy’s world was much tinier than ours, and I can imagine the sort of thinking that went into his worldview. I don’t suppose that he would have found universal assent for what he included or what he left out though, the proportions or topology. A universal flood for Ptolemy, a far more educated and knowledgable person than Moses or the scribes who compiled the text of scriptures in 550 BC, would have been possible, since the world was so small.
I got to thinking though, if as Genesis 7:20 says, “The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits” (NIV) then a universal flood would have covered Mt. Everest by more than 23 feet. A note by the translators suggests that this passage could be translated “rose more than fifteen cubits, and the mountains were covered” does not suggest more than a local phenomena, a common occurrence for the Mesopotamian river basin. Many readers who trust the veracity of the Jewish scriptures breathe a sigh of relief.
But, enter the moderns, like Ken Ham, and you have a universal flood, implying that Everest was covered by more than 23 feet of water. Everest is 8,848 meters above sea level. That implies that in 40 days and nights, it rained about 221 meters a day, ~9.21 meters an hour, (for the non-scientific among us ~30.21 feet per hour or an inch every 2 minutes) over the whole earth. I admit, speaking as a modern, that Everest is growing ~4 millimeters a year, but this amounts to only about 24 meters in 6000 years, shortly after the “creation event” for Hammites and Ussherites. This wouldn’t change the calculation much.
Give space for another passage of Genesis, 7:11 where the “Springs of the deep” burst forth and maybe that figure for daily rain is a little high. Now scientifically speaking, when we look for springs of the deep, underground reservoirs of such magnitude, we do not find them. But according to the US Geological Survey, in a page that answers the question “How much water is in the earth?”, it turns out that there isn’t much at all compared to the 8,848 meters of water deep required to cover Everest. In fact rough calculations of the average volume of the earth a radius of 6371 km = 1.08 x10^12 or 1,080,000,000,000 km^3 and the additional volume of water needed to get the water up to that height, would constitute approximately 10x10^9 or 10 billion km^3 about 7.22 times the amount of water on the earth at this time, 1,386,000,000 km^3. So some terrible questions come up.
(I was so happy to find that note on the alternate reading of that passage in Genesis 7:20. It sort of solves the whole puzzle Ham puts up as a matter of fact. Translations may not be as reliable as Ham wants them to be.)
The greatest difficulties come for the literalists who want a universal flood. It’s too much water, where did it come from? There are no large (4-8 kilometer deep) caverns in the earth, and there never were, if the laws of physics obtained back then, and there was never a dome of water in the sky. After getting all that water here in an impossible downpour, where did it go? All the Bible says is that the waters began to recede until later in the year when the ark set down on the land. In total, about a year’s time had transpired before the inhabitants got off the ark.
What we have in the necessity of a universal flood is a miraculous event, (that means God going against the laws of nature (though I don’t think God does that)) implying God couldn’t see the bad behavior of people beforehand, and had to come up with an ad hoc resolution to the problem. If there is a God, this version of God that the literalists have cooked up is almost laughably puny, certainly not worthy of worship. And if that’s all God is, then the new Athiests are correct to dispose of him.
I think God is wiser than that. To be consistent, the literalists have a terribly contradictory text on their hands. How they have managed to fool themselves into believing their interpretation true is beyond me. I think the Bible is much more human and subtle. The writers were not robots copying down texts dictated to them by an angel, or God himself. They understood the complexities of human nature and even divine providence. We do them a terrible disservice to treat these texts as a logical puzzle without even considering how human these stories are.
Here’s the latest from Reasons.org. Reasons to Believe just published a paper on the universal flood. They have better numbers and research than my speculation above, but conclude generally the same thing I did. Here it is: The Universal Flood.