RasTafarIWork, your reasoning is impressive even though I disagree with the result. I respect your intellect and I enjoy reasoning with minds I respect.
Let me back a slight bit to this statement:
"Today many think they live in the epitome of civilization, science, knowledge, etc, and that we have advances so much. So they reason that prophets such as Noah, and the ark story are false, yet cannot see the truth. Simply because the canal mind cannot reason with higher knowledge. yet they are wrong."
You see this as higher knowledge. I see it as lower. Let me explain. Higher knowledge suggests a bird's eye view that naturally gets from a story told from a third-person omniscient standpoint. The reality though is that the author is not a god. They are simply gods to their story. Their lower perspective is told in a different voice; that of the 3rd person omniscient writers. So when you read the story you read about characters that have a lower framework of knowledge, wisdom, and consciousness, but the writer... you see... the writer is an INVISIBLE HAND (a slight nod to the handwriting on the wall) in the story. The writer, knows everything going on in the story because it's "his story". And we know from American history, that it is incomplete and that there is an active political desire to edit history and keep the story of history being told from a certain narrative. Truth need not apply.
So when we talk about the character of Noah... what were the limits of his knowledge? Did he traverse the globe and know how big it was? Did he have access to satellite networks and more cameras pointing down at our world than telescopes pointing up? I would submit to you that if this was a regular story in the Fiction section of the library you would have no reservations about processing the story on these 2 levels: what is known, perceived, believed, by the characters in the story, and what is known, perceived, or believed by the writer acting as a 3rd person omniscient and therefore seeing the events from a higher vantage point. Even if that vantage point is merely later in time, that gives the perspective of "hindsight" which we say is always 20/20.
You regard Noah as a prophet because God told Noah about the flood. Right? Noah knows nothing about this without God. So if God says "I'm going to send a flood to the whole world" then in Noah's mind the whole world will be flooded. When Noah sees the limits of his vision filled with water this would seem like confirmation. And yet, a tsunami that can flood a large area could be, in the perspective of those affected, mistaken for a global flood. According to science (geology especially), no global flood actually happened. We can see this in the fossil record and layers of sediment as well as even layers of ice. If it happened, the Earth(planet) herself would bear eternal witness. Instead, it is a witness that this never happened.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/650662/biggest-tsunamis-in-history
And I'm not saying it was definitely a tsunami. Don't get me wrong. I have simply noticed the difference between how we treat natural disasters in modern times and how ancient humans saw them through the lens of superstition.
Nicky Haley just made the news again. This time it was due to the fact that she's supporting a Christian pastor, John Hagee, who said that New Orleans was hit by a storm because of the gay pride parade that was planned. He also said that the antichrist will be gay and created the "blood moon prophecy" suggesting that lunar events in 2014 were the start of the end times.
I'm not trying to bash the man, but he exposes a level of superstition that many others have which is why he is comfortable preaching this stuff to a huge audience. And so when there is a natural disaster, as humans, we have the tendency to look for a REASON. We then pair this reason with our beliefs and (unconsciously) our imagination. It combines into a story narrative just like the Epic of Gilgamesh... just like the Deluge of Noah. Local people saw the destruction but guess what? There were humans in other places who weren't killed by the flood. They simply didn't know about those people because they weren't omniscient.
I used to think humans only sacrificed virgins to volcanoes in movies. But no. People used to literally sacrifice humans to volcanoes and ways of preventing disasters from happening because they were afraid of upsetting the gods. So both the Noah story and the Epic of Gilgamesh feature gods/God who are/is upset. It's literally pulled from the playbook of human superstition. So are you going to argue that the sacrifices all over Peru and the Andes were some kinds of higher knowledge? I don't think you would. That's because those civilizations were not living anything by the bible. They didn't know JAH at all. But they still believed the gods were connected with natural disasters just like when the Israelites saw the lightning and heard the thunder they were afraid and mistook it for the voice of God. Higher knowledge? No... human nature.
When we get afraid our imagination creates monsters and devils. When we're happy our imaginations create unicorns, fairies and sprites. We are Creators. We have always been creators. And we create stories that we ourselves believe in and stories can be powerful enough to change us. We often rewrite ourselves by writing stories. If anything, THAT, is the higher knowledge; the knowledge of how to manipulate (constructively or otherwise) humanity through different artforms.
|
|
