Genesis: My recollection is that as an act of willful intent every person on the planet, save members of one family, were intentionally drowned.
Uh, yeah. Right. And why is it, then, that there are animals today indigenous to specific parts of the world? They all got off the Ark in the same place, right? And how did the Ark fit all the insect specimens?
Obviously, the Great Flood is a parable and/or legend. There was an amazing flood when a giant lake emptied through a newly formed crack into a relatively flat area. (I'm sorry - I don't remember the specifics since it's been years since i read the article, but it was in a geographically appropriate place for biblical legends.) It is thought that this was where the legends of the flood may have originated. Surely anybody in the region would have thought the whole world flooded.
Only the hardcore fundamentalists believe that Moses saved all the animals by loading them two by two onto a boat. To dismiss Christianity because it has a few fanciful stories that you think all Christians believe literally is to misjudge the intelligence of a lot of Christians.
And this includes newborn children who had no guilt except that of their parents on their heads.
Meh. We could argue for months on the concept of original sin, but I don't tend to blame baby deaths on God. People die. Animals die. Plants die. Sometimes those plants and animals and people are very young. Do you want a world with a zero infant fatality rate? You're the one talking in another thread about our population already being too big. Death is the price of living.
Exodus: My recollection is that as an act of willful intent every first born male child was murdered even though likely all but a handful had done nothing to deserve that fate.
An act of a tyrannical human, not of God.
if there is a god ... penicillin was created and hidden. And hundreds of millions of newborn children perished for lack of it.
Another human act. God didn't reach in and take away the Penicillin.
I can not square that with a deity that gives a rip about its creations.
Do you have kids, Dan? Have you ever noticed that sometimes you have to go ahead and let them make mistakes? Does that mean you don't care about them?
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