For The Noah Enthusiasts. (Not really.) A brief, humorous read.

by Open mind 25 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • Open mind
    Open mind

    Here's a couple more excerpts from "Letters from the Earth" by Mark Twain.

    If you're a believer in Biblical inerrancy, read no further. You won't appreciate what follows, IMO.

    The first deals with the absurdity of the amount of water required, the second deals with a highly important Ark passenger that almost didn't make it. :-)

    BTW, "Letters from the Earth" is based on the premise that one of Gabriel & Michael's more outspoken brethren, (Satan), decided to pop in on one of God's tiny little experiments (Earth) and see how things were going. And while he was here, he sent these "Letters from the Earth" back to his buddies in heaven. Why the letters? Because this was one of several times that Satan got put into a heavenly "time out" (my words, not Twain's) and he didn't have anything better to do while biding his time waiting to be let back in.

    OK, the 1st excerpt from pg 42 (my edition):
    ********************************
    LETTER IX

    The Ark continued its voyage, drifting around here and there and yonder, compassless and uncontrolled, the sport of the random winds and the swirling currents. And the rain, the rain, the rain! It kept on falling, pouring, drenching, flooding. No such rain had ever been seen before. Sixteen inches a day had been heard of, but that was nothing to this. This was a hundred and twenty inches a day -- ten feet! At this incredible rate it rained forty days and forty nights, and submerged every hill that was four hundred feet high. Then the heavens and even the angels went dry; no more water was to be had.

    As a Universal Flood it was a disappointment, but there had been heaps of Universal Floods before, as is witnessed by all the Bibles of all the nations, and this was as good as the best one.

    At last the Ark soared aloft and came to a rest on the top of Mount Ararat, seventeen thousand feet above the valley, and its living freight got out and went down the mountain.

    **********************************

    I just loved the "submerged every hill that was four hundred feet high" part. Timing is everything.

    OK, here's another excerpt regarding an Ark passenger that almost got left behind.
    (pg 25. )
    ***********************************
    LETTER VI

    On the third day, about noon, it was found that a fly had been left behind. The return voyage turned out to be long and difficult, on account of the lack of chart and compass, and because of the changed aspects of all coasts, the steadily rising water having submerged some of the lower landmarks and given to higher ones an unfamiliar look; but after sixteen days of earnest and faithful seeking, the fly was found at last, and received on board with hymns of praise and gratitude, the Family standing meanwhile uncovered, out of reverence for its divine origin. It was weary and worn, and had suffered somewhat from the weather, but was otherwise in good estate. Men and their families had died of hunger on barren mountain tops, but it had not lacked for food, the multitudinous corpses furnishing it in rank and rotten richness. Thus was the sacred bird providentially preserved.

    Providentially. That is the word. For the fly had not been left behind by accident. No, the hand of Providence was in it. .....

    (Break from text: Twain now explains why Noah set sail under hurried conditions but how God had forseen this and actually planned for the fly to be left behind.)

    .....He (Noah) would have all the other diseases, and could distribute them among the new races of men as they appeared in the world, but he would lack one of the very best -- typhoid fever; a malady which, when the circumstances are especially favorable, is able to utterly wreck a patient without killing him; for it can restore him to his feet with a long life in him, and yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, and idiotic. The housefly is its main disseminator, and is more competent and more calamitously effective than all the other distributors of the dreaded scourge put together. And so, by foreordination from the beginning of time, this fly was left behind to seek out a typhoid corpse and feed upon its corruptions and gaum its legs with the germs and transmit them to the repeopled world for permanent business. From that one housefly, in the ages that have since elapsed, billions of sickbeds have been stocked, billions of wrecked bodies sent tottering about the earth, and billions of cemeteries recruited with the dead.

    It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmnesses; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindnesses repented of in permanent malignities.

    ****************************************

    Well, my fingers are tired so I'll stop. I'm probably pushing the envelope of copyright "fair use" anyway.

    I hope that gives you a good taste of what to expect from "Letters from the Earth". I will warn you that Twain wrote at a time of blatant racism and so some of that comes through. But I get the sense that Twain himself didn't look down on other races, but that was certainly the mindset of the day.

    His writings on the way God set up human sexuality and the "laws" surrounding it are pretty funny too.

    OK, I'm done.

    OM

  • LtCmd.Lore
    LtCmd.Lore
    Well, my fingers are tired so I'll stop. I'm probably pushing the envelope of copyright "fair use" anyway.

    It's Mark Twain, his works are all in the public domain.

    http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/twain/letearth.htm

    (Sorry, I guess I could have said that a long time ago and saved you all the typing...)

    Lore - What.Would.Satan.Do?

  • freeme
    freeme
    Regardless of YOUR problems with how plants survived or how certain animals got to
    certain isolated places after the flood or regardless of how many billions of insect species
    there are or regardless of how there is a need to separate salt and fresh water animals,
    regardless of all of that- it happened. God took care of the details. Genesis was written
    from what Moses could understand of God's information. Moses couldn't understand the
    miracles of protecting the plants and water animals and the other logistical problems.
    It is faith.

    thats what my wife told me when i talked to her about the topic.

    the problem is that all the stuff god had to do to make it happen is in my view contradictionary to the bible. he might even recreate some animals noah wasnt able to save.

    the funny thing is she told me that god didnt do anything more than the stuff in the bible. so the plants survived the water and all animals including the galapagos ones and the kangaroos were on the arch. have faith!

    (she literally told me that and got angry that i dont have the faith to believe it)

  • VM44
    VM44
  • VM44
    VM44

    Index to more good articles:

    http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm

  • skyking
    skyking

    Great information Guys

    A+++

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