> God must love sef-confident idiots. She made a lot of them.
>
> The ones that believe the earth is going to cook or flood ? =A0I suppose =
you'll tell
me next that explains Noah's Ark.
The IPCC are fairly confident that if we don't stop burning fossil carbon at the current rate, the consequent global warmng will eventually cook our goose and flood our coastal cities. Their confidence is based on an appreciation of the scientific evidence that you haven't bothered to develop, and is certainly not idiotic. Your confidence in your own scientific judgement is less well-founded.
The current explanation of the Noah's Ark story (whch seems to have been poached from the epic of Gilgamesh) doesn't have much in common with the consequences of unrestrained anthropogenic global warming
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so Graham adds another element to his reputation as a universally ill- informed Renaissance ignoramus,
Now, for how I see "The Bible" telling the Noah's Ark story:
According to Christians with dozens to 1-2 more orders of magnitude more quotations from the "New Testament", their noted temporarily-Earth-incarnated localized embodiment of God has done quite of bit of speaking/preaching via "parables".
The more-fundamentalist Christians do like to say that God is something quite constant/unchanging.
That makes me give great suspicion that notable stories of events as far back as Genesis have at least some of those being parables - especially the more extreme ones, such as the stories of Noah's ark and the one of the destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah.
Noah cannot have possibly taken onto his ark coastal-land-limited animals of The Americas.
As I see this from aspect of considering that story to be a parable: God said that God would never again "flood the world" as was supposedly done. That Bible section does even mention rainbows as a sign that God will never again attempt suich a feat. I see that as a sign that God will never (after now) befall Earth with a natural disaster to selectively kill sinners. I give good chance for reason to be failure to destroy sin by humans on Earth via destruction of all humans outside the most righteous family or ark-riding small number of families.
For that matter, I do see the Noah's Ark story to be a parable!
As for reason:
How about the Sodom/Gemorah story?
(I paraphrase)
God says to Lot:
You are in an especially sinful city that offends sinfully greatly in many ways, including inhospitality in general, inhospitality to women, inhospitality to foreigners, rape, assault, (whatever....)
Lot offers his daughters (however wisely or otherwise) to be assaulted/robbed by the sinful criminals in Sodom, but the felons prefer Lot's sons, (How good a father is someone offering *any offspring* to felons!)
But the story then goes to (I paraphrase):
God: Hie thie and your family well out of town before sunrise!
Lot: Why?
God: You are in 1 of the 2 most sinful cities on the whole planet! I am going to destroy those sinful cities!
Lot: What if there are 25 righteous men in a targeted city?
God: I won't destroy that city if there are 25 good men there!
(Condense down to God saying God won't destroy the sinful 2 cities even if only 5 righteous men were there)
God: (I paraphrase) But there ain't 5 righteous men there, and you are among the less-than-5. So I say get well out of town by dawn tomorrow, and *Don't Look Back*!
I see this is a parable saying that God *will not* inflict citywide or worldwide destruction after finding doing so being unsuccessful at ridding the world of sinners.
Should God be a constantly knowing-as-ever-well-ever-as-best-in-past-9,000-years, God should know well enough that whatever major disasters that God was supposed to befall humans with a few thousand years ago would be as unsuccessful at ridding the world of sinners as such events according to trhe Bible ended up being.
That is why I see God having "a track record of speaking in parables" going back to Genesis as opposed to only starting with an Earthly human embodiment that spent a bit of time being an Orthodox Jewish carpenter that died by being railroaded to being executed by crucifixion.
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