Noah, his Ark, and his sperm count
Offline A thought manifested yesterday while I lay in bed restless and fidgeting. The Devil has just sent a demon to my bed that paralyzed me for a minute or two while humming an evil tune. Well at least that is what my priest told me when I was 12. Now I am 21 and having done my own research I found that it is not actually a demon, I just wake up right out of REM sleep and remain caught in some kind of suspended state between the dream world and reality. That is why I see demons, it is actually quite common, it's called sleep paralysis, it's hereditary.
Anyway more to the point, after my hallucination last night I started to think about Religion. I have been an atheist for a while now and on those restless nights I think myself to sleep my deconstructing every argument a Christian could have in support of his/her religion. One came to mind last night:
We all know the story of Noah, his ark, and his many animal friends. As far as I remember it happened a few years after the world began.. 4000 years ago (joke). Are we meant to believe that with only 4000 years of breeding mankind has managed to go from a handful to 6,602,224,175? Noah must have been a very, very, busy man when the waters receded, hence the sperm count title. Let's not even mention the animals and their breeding.
I realize I could be wrong about this, I haven't read the bible in a year or two. Maybe it has a paragraph at the end of the Noah story about God getting all his little worker angels to work overtime in the human factory.
If Jesus was born today he would be institutionalized as a schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur.
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I have experienced sleep paralysis as well. However I have never hallucinated anything during it.
The story of Noahs Ark has been thoroughly debunked all over the place. If you would like to read a book dedicated to talking about it I suggest Noahs Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History by William Ryan & Walter Pitman. Very entertaining read.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Well obviously, God Jeebus Lord and Saviour must have endowed Noah with the stamina of 40 men and the fertility of 120 asses. And then sent an angel to alter the genes of each of his progeny to prevent the world's worst case of inbreeding this side of the Mississippi.
I was watching a show on that whole shebang on the History channel and it was fascinating/hilarious. They were doing a side-by-side of the bible and I forget which, but one of Babylonian texts. And for each instance of an event, the bible version was grossly exagerrated. Like how it rained continuously for fourty days and fourty nights - apparently 40 = about 6. That's a common theme, because once you have four people counting on all their fingers, they are just like screw it, it's a large enough number no one cares.
Deus Ex Machina - God from a Machine? Or is it Deus Est Machina - God IS a Machine?
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
Jesus always existed you heretic! Just because the Son wasn't mentioned in the Old Testament doesn't mean he didn't exist back then! How deranged is that type of thinking? sheesh.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Not only that but Jesus existed on other planets even before he came to earth. How else would the aliens be saved?
I only hope there's a seperate heaven for aliens. I never know what to talk about with aliens. Maybe they'll put the aliens and the Mormons together because then the rest of us can tell Mormon and alien jokes without offending anyone.
Frosty's coming back someday. Will you be ready?
First of all, sleep paralysis is crazy stuff, I have had more episodes that I care to remember...a sweater left on a dresser looks like a snake...the doorway becomes a big gaping mouth .... shadows thrown from a bathroom night light creating shapes that move and wiggle. It can be friggin frightening!
As for the Noah thing, I never thought about your point...that would have to be some crazy sperm he had, he would have to be busy for whatever time remained in his life...was he like 900 years old like some of them characters in that booK?
-Renee
Slowly building a blog at ~
http://obsidianwords.wordpress.com/
Yeh it is, I am use to it now. I see dark cloacked figures and I dont really care because I know why I am seeing it. However the times that I cant breath for 30 seconds that still freaks me out. The first 10 seconds are fine then you really start to feel it.....
If Jesus was born today he would be institutionalized as a schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur.
On sleep paralysis, try and exercise regularly. Also meditation is pretty good for it. It basically clears your thoughts. You don't need to chant or anything, just TRY to clear your mind. Another exercise I've found quite useful (although a bit tad weird for some people) is instructing your subconcious. This can be done during the time you first arise from sleep and just before your drift off. I still get it sometimes but funnily apart from hallucinations, I also feel my genitalia being fonddled. Hope that helps. The advice I mean.
On Noah, I thought even before you consider the impossible act of populating the world. Wouldn't his children's children suffer from some kind of inbreeding? Did he have like a harem that they don't tell you? Also, was the whole world subjugated to this apocalyptic flood or just a small region like say, I dunno, Japan?
Well, speaking from my not inconsequential understanding of human genetics, the problem isn't the sperm count and it's not the populating, either. Or not exactly.
Population bottlenecks being what they are, Noah's three sons and their wives represent about the worst possible plan to populate/repopulate a planet. Undesirable recessive traits would have been shared between Shem, Ham and Japheth, and would have been heavily concentrated in succeeding generations, as incest is inevitable in this delightful little scenario. I much prefer the Greek flood story, to tell you the truth. In that one, the survivors are merely asked to throw rocks over their shoulders and new humans just pop up, with plenty of potential genetic diversity. And animals and plants just magically come back.
Now why do I go on so? Well, it's to make the point that the ancient Hebrews were breathtakingly stupid in their crafting of fiction. The Ancient Greeks, while no more or less wrong than the Hebrews, actually understood that an omnipotent being had none of the piddling limitations of his creation.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell