The March 1, 2002 Watchtower contains a couple of articles on Noah's Flood and the application of this legend to "our day". Thrust of the articles is first to show that the Flood was a real, earthwide event, and then to scare ignorant readers into accepting the JW message by claiming that our world is about to undergo a similar divine punishment. Pretty standard fare for long time JW observers.

In the past the Watchtower Society has published extensive material purporting to show that a global Flood occurred a few thousand years ago. Over the years a great deal of unassailable geological information has appeared that proves that a global Flood could not have so occurred, and therefore that the Society's claims are nonsense. The only thing that cannot be definitively used to disprove the claim of a global Flood is that old saw that there are lots of Flood legends in various cultures around the world, and so, during the last few years the Society has grasped mostly at this straw to salvage its notions about the Flood. The main reason that legends cannot be used to disprove that Noah's Flood occurred is obvious: legends are by nature not generally susceptible to disproof. I cannot prove that that unicorns had no influence on the ancient Greeks.

Here follows the text of the Society's latest discussion on the Flood, from the above-mentioned Watchtower, pages 4-5. Speaking of the Genesis account of the Flood, the article says:

The above article contains many fallacies, as the astute reader can see. Let's look at some of them, line by line:

This is a good example of how the Society's writers use certain words to hedge their statements so as to give a wrong impression to readers. The writer says that the Flood "would never have been completely forgotten". That means that if the writer can find even a single instance of a Flood legend, then his statement is correct, and by implication, "such an awesome catastrophe" must have "really happened".

But does the fact that the statement is correct prove much of anything? Not at all. For one thing, really cool stories tend to propagate. The Flood legend is a particularly entertaining and frightening story. Relatively recent history demonstrates how early explorers from the 15th-century onward related some of their favorite stories to various peoples and tribes with whom they came in contact, and then later explorers found that the stories had been changed somewhat and incorporated into the local body of lore. They were astounded to find that certain stories were "common" to their own culture and to that of the "primitives" they met.

The history of Egypt is a good example that strongly tends to disprove the Society's claims. Recorded Egyptian history goes back to at least 3500 B.C.E. -- more than a thousand years earlier than the supposed "biblical date" for the Flood. And because fully functioning civilizations able to make written records, like Egypt, don't spring full-blown from nothing, it is obvious that Egypt must have functioned as a society for hundreds of years longer than that. Since Egptian history is continuous right through the time when a global Flood supposedly occurred, such a Flood obviously did not occur.

A particularly important exception to the Society's 'rule' about legends is that the Egytians have no Flood legend at all. One would expect that a major civilization right there in the Middle East would have a Flood legend, "if it really happened".

Since the Society's premise is not proved, the use of "hence" here is inappropriate.

Using the phrase "it may not be a coincidence" might convince JW readers, but not someone capable of thinking. The fact is that "festivals for the dead" are celebrated at all times of the year in various cultures, so the Society's argument is meaningless. There is also an internal flaw in that argument. If Noah and his family were so faithful to God that they alone survived the Flood, then they would not have remembered with fondness those who died in the Flood. Indeed, they would have remembered the destruction with happiness, just as Jehovah's Witnesses today are taught to look with happiness on the "coming destruction" of our civilization. Most festivals for the dead honor the dead, and so if any such festivals arose after the Flood, they can hardly have been connected to a remembrance of the Flood.

This is meaningless. As I said above, particularly entertaining or frightening legends propagate easily from culture to culture. We know today that there was extensive trade among various civilizations in the ancient Middle East, the Mediterranean area, Persia and India and the surrounding areas, and even China. Why would it be surprising if some legends were traded along with physical goods?

Likely the similarities come from propagation of one particular legend, not from some common remembrance of an ancient event. The Society's poor argumentation skills is very evident here because they neglect to consider these possibilities. That this neglect is deliberate is easy to prove: The Society is well aware of the criticisms that have been published of views like its own. These views are not unique to the Society, for they are common in the literature of Fundamentalists going at least back to the 19th century.

The above is a wonderful example of lousy reasoning. The first sentence says that the many legends corroborate the Bible's account of the Flood. This would indicate to a reader that the Bible is therefore supported by the legends. But the very next sentence negates the value of this support completely: "Hence, we do not need to rely on legends..." What? Why show that legends support the Bible if the Bible is so reliable that we don't need legends to support it? Naturally, the JW readers for whom this nonsense is intended are too intellectually beaten down to notice such blatantly ridiculous reasoning.

I'll leave the finding of other flaws in the WT article to other readers. For a more extensive treatment of why Flood legends are meaningless in proving the historical reality of a global Flood, see the section "Flood Legends" of the essay "The Flood" here: http://www.geocities.com/osarsif/flood20.htm .

AlanF

Thanks Alan

It's funny the wt doesn't treat the trinity idea the same way. There are many divine trinities scattered throughout ancient and more modern myth and legend. Using the wt's above reasoning, this would prove christendom is right.

SS

thanks for your analysis of the language too.

Inigo Montoya to the WTS: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Hey AlanF,

I thought you was to smart to read the Watchtower.

AlanF,

If you want to keep up, then you better move fast. Because I'm a fast cat.

Alan, I am very glad you started this thread.
I must get a copy of that March 1, 2002 Watchtower!

Isaac Newton Vail, the originator of the "Earth's Annular
Ring" or "Cloud Canopy" idea for the Great Flood is also
credited as the first to come up with the "anthropological"
argument for a worldwide flood.

Vail goes into the myths of various cultures in his book,
"The Earth's Annular System" (1912) and "The Misread Record"
(1921).

Here is what is written on the first page of "The Misread Record"

"Being an Explanation of the Annular Theory of the
Formation of the Earth, with Special Reference to the Flood
and the Legends and Folk Lore of Ancient Races."

The Watchtower used to endorse fully Vail's idea. There were
references to Vailian rings and cloud canopies in "The Photodrama
of Creation" (1914), the "Creation" book (1927), and in "The Truth Shall Make you Free" (1943). There is indication that Vail's
ideas are also in the "Paradise Lost" book (1958) although Vail
is not mentioned by name in that book.

Rutherford wrote in the "Creation" book that "It seems to have
been the plan of Jehovah God to begin the increase of light upon
his great work for the benefit of man about the year 1874 A.D.
It was in that yearthat Isaac N. Vail first published a pamphlet entitled 'The Earth's Annular System'." [page 29]

Vail's ideas were never accepted by mainstream astronomers or
geologists, mainly because the ideas violated basic physics!
In all of the drawings of the cloud canopy depicted in Vail's
books, the canopy is shown to be revolving around the axis of
the earth, much like a cylinder rotating about an axis.

Planetary gases orbiting about a gravitational body would not
behave like that, but would rather spread out and form a flat
disk like ring, such as we see in the rings orbiting the planet Saturn.

I think Vail must have known he had problems with the physics
involved. This is why he spent more pages in his books talking
about old legends and myths than about the mechanics of orbiting
rings.

The Watchtower has not mentioned Vail in any books or magazines
for decades, but is still showing the influence of Vail's thinking
by continuing with the "myths and legends" Flood argument.

--VM44

Alan I will look into it but believe the Atlantis legend and the Flood of Deukalion were separate legends. And the way this goes is that Plato recounts that Solon mentioned the Deukalion flood to an Egyptian priest who said that even Deukalion's flood was predated by huge floods and then proceded to give the story of Atlantis. From Egypt via Solon the story of Atlantis came to Greece. So it indeed is Egyptian in origin.

As we go into 2002 growing scientific concensus is that there was a cataclysmic regional flood in the area pinpointed by the Bible and this regional flood in turn impacted the rest of the planet, hence was global in impact though localized in origin. I do hope you are respectful of scientists and scholars like these.

Go to the following link and you will learn about midway down of
Ray Ballard whom National Geographic calls its resident-explorer who believes and has evidence that there was a massive influx of water from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea Basin
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lectures/seattle_events.html
We'll be hearing more from him and other scientists in the future.
Search a little and you'll find lots of other links about Ballard et al.

Further, Alan, the Bible Scholar Michael Sanders has noted for example that settlement of early Sumeria in the northern plain of the Tigres and Euphrates occurred after the Black Sea Flood. The water to fill the Black Sea Basin would have lowered the oceans around the world by a foot, which shows how the regional flood was also global. http://ancienthistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.biblemysteries.com/library/blacksea/

In surfing I came across the following which argues that Cuba may have been what was actually meant by Atlantis,

http://www.andrewcollins.net/page/secretloc/cubapoints.htm

and in recent weeks some scientists found actual evidence that an unknown ancient civilization was indeed submerged just off the coast of Cuba. Although I don't have that link handy I do recall someone else recently posted about it on this very board, and if you search for it a little with key words like Lost, Civilization, Cuba you should find it.

The points in favour of Cuba being Atlantis are listed as:

Plato says that Atlantis was an island landmass which lay in the Atlantic Ocean beyond which was a series of `other lands' that enabled `voyagers' from his own world to reach the `opposite continent'. This statement perfectly describes the geographical relationship between Cuba and both the Bahamas and the Mid-Caribbean island group which have been used since ancient times as stepping stones to reach the American mainland.

Plato tells us that Atlantis possessed a large fertile plain protected from cold northerly winds by mountain ranges. This precisely describes Cuba's great western plain, between Havana and Pinar del Río, shielded between November and February each year from `les nortes', the cold northerly winds which come in from the eastern United States, by the Cord de Guaniguanico mountain range.

Plato tells us that Atlantis was drowned during earthquakes and floods which occurred during one terrible night and a day. Cuba's great plain was partially drowned following the rise in sea level brought about by the melting of the ice at end of the glacial age, c. 8000 BC. Some 500 years earlier, Cuba - along the rest of the Antilles - would have been devastated by earthquakes and tsunamis following the fragmentation and multiple impacts of a comet which devastated the Western Hemisphere in c. 8600-8500 BC. The drowned portion of the plain now lies beneath the Bay of Batabanó and once stretched as far as the Isla de Juventus (Isle of Youth).

Over 60 sites of possible archaeological interest have been noted on the former Bahaman landmass, now known to marine geologists as the Great Bahama Bank. By far the greatest accumulation of sites cluster on its south-west edge close to Cay Guinchos, Diamond Point and Cay Lobos facing out towards the northern coast of Cuba. If these curious features do turn to be of artificial construction then it means that the proposed former Bahaman culture was integrally linked with the Cuban mainland. Before the waters rose up after the end of the last Ice Age only the Old Bahama Channel would have separated Cuba from the Bahaman landmass.

The memory of an Atlantic island called Atlantis which lay in the Far West would appear to derive from Iberic Phoenician, and later Carthaginian, sea-journeys to the western Atlantic seaboard from around 1200 BC onwards. After the fall of Carthage in 147 BC the former Carthaginian territories were occupied by seafaring Berber tribes who as the Moors invaded Spain in the eighth century AD. They reintroduced the concept of a western isle lying far out in the ocean and called it Antilia, a name derived from the same Semitic word root as Atlantis showing their common origin. Geographers have identified Antillia as Cuba, while the appearance of Antilia on medieval maps matches very well a truncated form of Cuba shown on the Turkish Piri Reis map of 1513. Professor Charles Hapgood of Keene University determined that this nautical chart was derived originally from a patchwork of pre-Columbian source maps, suggesting a maritime knowledge of Cuba before the time of the Conquest.

The founding families of various Central American cultures, as well as great civilisers such as Quetzalcoatl and Votan, were said to have come from an island set in the waters located in an easterly direction. Unquestionably it was one of the Caribbean islands, and various traditions record that the island in question was Cuba. The blood-red earth which dominates its western plain accounts for the name given to Quetzalcoatl's original homeland which was Huehue Tlapallan, the `old, old red land'. The other names given to this homeland were Tulan, a word which can be shown to have the same root as Atlantis.

Located on the Mesoamerican island homeland was a place of emergence of the human race known as the Seven Caves. The only location in the Caribbean which appears to fit its description is Ceuva # 1 of the `seven caves' complex at Punta del Este on Cuba's Isle of Youth. Its walls are adorned which dozens of petroglyphs of a celestial nature drawn many thousands of years ago.

Occasionally the seven tribes whose ancestors had emerged from the Seven Caves were seen as having constructed Seven Cities, arguably the root behind the Portuguese medieval belief in the existence of Seven Cities on the island of Antilia, the medieval form of Atlantis.

In the eighteenth century Friar Ramon de Ordoñez y Aguilar, canon of the cathedral town of Ciudad-Réal in Chiapas, told the odyssey of a Central American culture hero named Votan who came out of the east from a land called Valum Chivim and settled on an island named Valum Votan, identified as Cuba, before journeying on to the Yucatán. Andrew Collins demonstrates how Votan is the memory of a Bronze Age Iberic Phoenician seafarer who made transatlantic voyages as early as 2000 BC. A knowledge of Valum Votan's, or Cuba's, topography and catastrophe legends thus entered the classical world prior to the age of Plato. It was from such knowledge, particularly a description of Cuba's western plain, its fertility, its occupation by Iberic Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and the memory of a former great cataclysm which divided the Caribbean into individual islands, that Plato constructed his Atlantis account. A near contemporary writer known as pseudo-Aristotle also wrote about a similar island paradise in his work entitled On Marvellous Things Heard. C. 300 BC.

Cuba can also be identified as one of the Islands of the Hesperides, which the Roman geographer Statius Sebosus (as recorded by Pliny the Elder and Solinus) stated lay 40 days' sail beyond the Gorgades, an ancient name for the Cape Verde islands. It took Christopher Columbus 33 days to sail between the Cape Verdes and Barbados in the Caribbean on his third voyage to the New World in 1498. Like Atlantis, the concept of the Hesperides, the islands of the Far West, is considered to be of Phoenician origin.

Top Italian scientist Emilio Spedicato, Professor of Operations Research, at Bergamo University has recently proposed that the island of Hispaniola, Cuba's easterly neighbor, was Plato's Atlantis. Yet having reviewed Andrew Collins' evidence in favour of Cuba being Atlantis he now sees it `as a very good candidate …only archaeological work will perhaps solve the riddle.'

After and only after reading the foregoing, please go back to your previous comments and make the appropriate reassessments. Knowledge is important but so are courtesy, kindness and humility with a lack of quickness to take umbrage.

I'd still like to hear from Alan regarding my rejoinder.

Discovering that the Noachian flood never happened was the defining moment in my retreat from Watchtowerism. I was 40 years old. When the reality hit me I just curled up on the floor and sobbed. When I got up on my feet I felt a tremendous sense of liberation. I could no longer take much of the bible seriously.

For the average person it is much easier to disprove the flood than to disprove evolution.

Don't throw out the Baby with the flood-water!!!