So true...
It is like those theologians who keep saying Dawkins is not qualified to critique religion because he did not have his brain lobotomized by theology schools.
In a way they are right...had he studied theology he probably would have lost the ability to think and thus would not be able to see the lack of any merit in the twaddle they dish out.
So as a child, I didn't think about it very hard, because that would have been a sin. Poor little kids, and what we do to so many of them...sigh.
(sigh) You're right, of course.
If you use arguments comparing what's in the story to observable reality outside the religion, yes. But you won't have that same problem if you stick to dealing with the story's own inconsistencies with itself or with other parts of the Bible or with other beliefs in the religion. For example, pretty much every number the story mentions is contradicted somewhere else in the same story. And right before the flood God says he's limiting human life span to a certain length but right after it there's a list including at least eight people born after the flood who lived longer than that. And there's that bit about the sons of the gods reproducing with human women. And the story has animals divided into clean and unclean at the start but says people didn't eat any animals at all until afterward. And the first commandment God gave them after the flood was that if anybody ever does somebody wrong then the wronged party should take revenge, which not only is weirdly disconnected from the story but also contradicts other Bible verses saying not to take revenge. And the whole point of the flood was to rid the world of evil but evil's still here, making it God's biggest failure since all those animals he created trying to come up with a companion for Adam in chapter 2.
It has that in common with a lot of other tales/fables that are intended to teach lessons to children. Where it differs from most is that most of them are pretty direct and clear about exactly what the point is.
yes, there is that.
Here we have a book that you cannot understand what it is saying by just reading it.....rather you need to RELY on exegesis by OTHER people.
So one is forever relegated to never understanding what god wants to tell him by just reading god's words. Instead, we are to wait for some SELF-APPOINTED "expert" to tell us what it means. He too only got it because he read books after books of other self-appointed "experts" telling us what it means and all of them disagreeing with each other and more often than not they are diametrically opposed.
If these experts had any claim to divine inspiration in their "translations" then we might nod....but the proof is in the budding. If they were all divinely inspired why are they all disagreeing? Why is god's word so mercurial and slippery that hundreds of "experts" reading it cannot come to a consensus on what it means? They disagree often violently and with utter disdain to each other.
So it is a meaningless and worthless book and in the end:
A table is a chair if you just think about it the “right” way and a turd is an apple pie if you just accept to redefine your terms to suit.
It is all a metaphor and the metaphor is what some Rabbi defines it despite a thousand other Rabbis defining it in a thousand orthogonal and contrary ways.
It is a dream unless you want it to be true and it is not true unless you prefer it to be so and who knows unless you do and it is all fine unless you oppose me and then it is not.
OK, ask her to demonstrate the truth of her cozy assumption.
