Noah's Ark vs running a zoo

[atheist buddy]

The directory of the Bronx Zoo shows that it takes 205 full time professionals to feed, manage and keep safe 650 species of animals. That's 650 out of 8.7 million species of animals and plants in existence.

By rough approximation, we could say that if it takes 205 people to manage 650 species, it would take 2.7 million people to manage all 8.7 million species in a megazoo hosting all known species.

Let's say it would take another million highly qualified professionals to build this megazoo, and another million to gather all the animals.

So, a total of 4.7 million trained experts to maintain and manage 8.7 million species in a man-made environment.

On average, approximately 1 person for every two species.

Assuming Noah had 19 people helping him, he would be operating on a ratio of 1 person for every 435,000 species.

In other words, if you believe in the story of Noah, you believe that a bronze age (600 year old drunk) was 217,500 times better at running a massive zoo than modern people are.

And did I mention this 8.7 million species zoo had to float on water during a massive storm?


In light of these simple empirical facts, can we agree that anybody who believes the story of Noah's Ark actually happened, is victim of such intense delusion that it borders on mental disability?

Why is a professed belief in a flat earth an instant disqualification from public office, or from getting a high level job, or from attaining any kind of social status, but professed belief in Noah's Ark put on a pedestal, and regarded as acceptable if not mainstream?

[Wordleymaster1]

The directory of the Bronx Zoo shows that it takes 205 full time professionals to feed, manage and keep safe 650 species of animals. That's 650 out of 8.7 million species of animals and plants in existence.

By rough approximation, we could say that if it takes 205 people to manage 650 species, it would take 2.7 million people to manage all 8.7 million species in a megazoo hosting all known species.

Let's say it would take another million highly qualified professionals to build this megazoo, and another million to gather all the animals.

So, a total of 4.7 million trained experts to maintain and manage 8.7 million species in a man-made environment.

On average, approximately 1 person for every two species.

Assuming Noah had 19 people helping him, he would be operating on a ratio of 1 person for every 435,000 species.

In other words, if you believe in the story of Noah, you believe that a bronze age (600 year old drunk) was 217,500 times better at running a massive zoo than modern people are.

And did I mention this 8.7 million species zoo had to float on water during a massive storm?


In light of these simple empirical facts, can we agree that anybody who believes the story of Noah's Ark actually happened, is victim of such intense delusion that it borders on mental disability?
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Why is a professed belief in a flat earth an instant disqualification from public office, or from getting a high level job, or from attaining any kind of social status, but professed belief in Noah's Ark put on a pedestal, and regarded as acceptable if not mainstream?

God is magic
God can do anything
The bigger question is why would God need Noah to save the animals at all? Can't God do it?

God isn't only magic. He's also mysterious.

He can do anything, and he could do anything. It's impossible to understand him. He's utterly unpredictable in his omnipotent grandeur to feeble human minds.

Yet somehow Christian conservatives know that the creator of the universe doesn't want us to use condoms.

It doesn't even cross their minds that their certainty that God doesn't want us to use condoms could be a product of their feeble imperfect mind's inability to properly understand God's will that we use condoms as much as we want.

"God works in mysterious ways!" they say. Or, in other words: "We can't explain it with common sense or logic so we're gonna' chalk it up to God and call it a day!"

[dianaiad]

They're not. Cindarella is better. The Three Musketeers is better. Tom & Jerry is better.

Nobody praises rape, murder and slavery in any of these works of fiction.

this tells me that you have not read Cinderella, the Three Musketeers or actually watched Tom and Jerry.

Either that, or you have only been exposed to the Disney versions.

Cinderella celebrates mutilation, child abuse and revenge.
The Three Musketeers celebrates treason, violence and yes, murder.
Tom and Jerry celebrates violence in every episode.

[atheist buddy]

They're not. Cindarella is better. The Three Musketeers is better. Tom & Jerry is better.

Nobody praises rape, murder and slavery in any of these works of fiction.

this tells me that you have not read Cinderella, the Three Musketeers or actually watched Tom and Jerry.

Either that, or you have only been exposed to the Disney versions.

Cinderella celebrates mutilation, child abuse and revenge.
The Three Musketeers celebrates treason, violence and yes, murder.
Tom and Jerry celebrates violence in every episode.

File under: "Who cares".

Or maybe file under: "It's remarkable that in a thread where the central tenets of your faith are systematically demolished, you find that commentary on Tom & Jerry is more a propos than an actual response to the substance of my argument.

Your faith doesn't make sense on any level! Take it literally, and you've abandoned all reason. Take it metaphorically and you've reduced yourself to unjustifiably relying on the ramblings of bronze age shephards for moral guidance.

I'm not saying there is no God. I'm just saying there is absolutely no good reason to believe there is one.

Prove me wrong. Tell me a good reason to believe in God.

I bet that if you answer at all, it will be something along the lines of "It makes sense for me" or "I thought about it and prayed about it and that's why I believe". In other words your justification for believing in God will be not one inkling better than the justification anybody could provide for believing anything, including children's belief in Santa.

[ttruscott]

Doesn't matter who exists or not .

The whole ark story might be literally true.
But if we shouldn't destroy life without necessity then the flood/ark story describes an immoral being.
If killing on a whim is cool and righteous then the bible might be literally true.

Read the story again... The flood was a judgement against wicked violence by a righteous judge. Isn't condemning that as an atrocity suggesting we deny retributive justice of any kind and give over our cities and countries to violence without protest?

You see the sentence as to harsh and 'unnecessary,' a killing on a whim and I consider that the dangerous consequences of passively accepting violence in our cities as being countered on a global scale in this story. If it is right to stand against violence with execution in one place, the principle holds on the larger scale IF the judge is as righteous as Christianity contends.

I doubt a rejection of HIS justice here means support allowing violent criminals free access to one's own home and neighbourhood, but where is the difference? Local or global - the principle of retributive justice should hold.

Peace, Ted

[atheist buddy]

Doesn't matter who exists or not .

The whole ark story might be literally true.
But if we shouldn't destroy life without necessity then the flood/ark story describes an immoral being.
If killing on a whim is cool and righteous then the bible might be literally true.

Read the story again... The flood was a judgement against wicked violence by a righteous judge. Isn't condemning that as an atrocity suggesting we deny retributive justice of any kind and give over our cities and countries to violence without protest?

You see the sentence as to harsh and 'unnecessary,' a killing on a whim and I consider that the dangerous consequences of passively accepting violence in our cities as being countered on a global scale in this story. If it is right to stand against violence with execution in one place, the principle holds on the larger scale IF the judge is as righteous as Christianity contends.

I doubt a rejection of HIS justice here means support allowing violent criminals free access to one's own home and neighbourhood, but where is the difference? Local or global - the principle of retributive justice should hold.

Peace, Ted

You're making the argument that retributive justice is intrinsically morally justifiable. You're saying that much like it's justifiable to execute a mass murderer after he's been found guilty by a jury, it's justifiable to carry out the same action on a larger scale, such as the global flood of Genesis.

Here's the problem: If I debate this with you, and ask you pointed questions about how guilty and deserving of death all the unborn babies in the wombs of pregnant women were, or how guilty all the puppies and kittens and giraffe cubs were, you will not have a defensible answer.

So you will switch from saying that the events of the Great Flood weren't morally justifiable per se, to saying they were morally justifiable because it's God that did them, and anything God does is intrinisically moral, and we don't have the means of judging the actions of God.

In other words, you will start with an attempt at a logical argument, and then when that inevitably becomes non-viable, you will descend into the ultimate cop-out of declaring God beyond our judgement and making the entire discussion you had previously engaged in, totally moot.

You should first have a debate with yourself about your beliefs, and once you've figured them out, come to us so we can demolish them for you.

[dianaiad]

They're not. Cindarella is better. The Three Musketeers is better. Tom & Jerry is better.

Nobody praises rape, murder and slavery in any of these works of fiction.

this tells me that you have not read Cinderella, the Three Musketeers or actually watched Tom and Jerry.

Either that, or you have only been exposed to the Disney versions.

Cinderella celebrates mutilation, child abuse and revenge.
The Three Musketeers celebrates treason, violence and yes, murder.
Tom and Jerry celebrates violence in every episode.

File under: "Who cares".

you do.

Else you wouldn't have used those examples. If, as it turns out, they were bad examples, what does that lead a reader to think about the position you are using them to support?

If you are that unfamiliar with the stories you claim do NOT "praise[] rape, murder and slavery," how familiar can you be, one is tempted to ask, with the book you claim is worse than they are?

Or maybe file under: "It's remarkable that in a thread where the central tenets of your faith are systematically demolished, you find that commentary on Tom & Jerry is more a propos than an actual response to the substance of my argument.

Your faith doesn't make sense on any level! Take it literally, and you've abandoned all reason. Take it metaphorically and you've reduced yourself to unjustifiably relying on the ramblings of bronze age shephards for moral guidance.

I'm not saying there is no God. I'm just saying there is absolutely no good reason to believe there is one.

Prove me wrong. Tell me a good reason to believe in God.

Why?

I've never claimed to be able to prove that God exists, empirically. I only believe He does. I don't do so for 'a reason.' I do so because the evidence I accept, for me, supports that idea.

Honestly; I find nothing scary about simply ending when my mortal life does. I just don't think it does.

I bet that if you answer at all, it will be something along the lines of "It makes sense for me" or "I thought about it and prayed about it and that's why I believe". In other words your justification for believing in God will be not one inkling better than the justification anybody could provide for believing anything, including children's belief in Santa.

...and you are here, telling me that I have no right to believe in God because YOU see no sense in it?

I wonder if you can see the irony in that position?

[DanieltheDragon]

[Replying to post 45 by dianaiad]

I agree about tom and jerry the violence in it while funny is actually pretty bad when you think about it and is presented in such away as to glorify them.

Cinderella and The 3 muskateers does not present a moral story that you have to agree with. As the reader you are the objective 3rd party witnessing the events unfolded you can make any moral proclamations you want of it. The bible is a bit different as the stories are not so much stories but prose designed to teach a specific moral trait or value. You can't really disagree with the bible can you? You can't say I think this story is wrong because it goes against my moral values. Instead what happens is the believer must find loopholes around these moral issues to resolve the conflct. That is a bit of a different issue.

I mean think about it this way, god's laws about slavery dictate that you can beat a slave to death so long as he doesn't die immediately, he must live for at least 1 day.

How do you deal with the fact that your god is ok with this behavior. In fact this was prescribed by god himself as to how to deal with slaves that he is ok with and commanded his people take?

How do you deal with those moral values?

I don't want to hear about not following the law of Moses, because this talks about the values of god himself. That he would subject his own creation to this type of suffering at the hands of his chosen people. This is about the values of god himself not just the laws that he prescribes.

[1213]

On what basis do we assume that a boat would float? Ummm, I don't get it, are you trying to reinforce the point you made above?

Sorry, I meant there is no reason to believe there was storm.

So, EITHER both a couple of Black Bears AND a couple of Pandas were on the Ark (in addition to a haf dozen other bear species), or a predecessor of all these different species of bears was on the Ark, AND THESE DIFFERENT SPECIES OF BEARS EVOLVED FROM IT- that's called macro-evolution.

Do you accept macro-evolution? If not, there were AT LEAST 17.4 million living organisms on that boat, including about 90 different species of whales and dolphins, about 80 species of sharks, and a few million others. All inside a boat.

I think it is obvious that some kind of “evolution� has happened. For example if we believe that all people are from those people that survived, something has happened, because we now have for example different skin colors, different shapes... I think it can be possible that similar thing has happened also with animals. But I wouldn’t call it evolution. I would rather use devolution or degeneration. But any way, in my opinion it is possible that there has happened differentiation in the offspring of species in the boundaries of certain attributes.

And I don’t see any reason to believe that water creatures should have been in the Ark, or that they would have been in the Ark. According to the story, only land animals went in the Ark.

[OnceConvinced]

[Replying to post 25 by Haven]


Just say the magic words "Abracadabra" and there would be no problem at all!

[Clownboat]

...

Are you saying that macroevolution is real and that new species emerged that didn't exist 6000 years ago? I mean, I agree with you (incidentally, it's a documented fact), but do you agree with this? Do you believe new species can emerge though macro-evolution?

...

Nope. No macro evolution, just, hang onto your hat, the finger of GOD. Yikes, I said it nowwwww... nut case alert!

What part of God's miracles in this story is NOT CONSISTENT with the whole message of the Bible? Should I care if they are not consistent with YOUR faith? I don't think so.

Peace, Ted

You should not care.

You are free to invent whatever concept you choose, whether it be magic or something else in order to maintain your preconceived religious beliefs.

To be fair, my kids claim that Santa's reindeer fly because of magic, so why should you not be given the same leeway?

Do you mind if I use logic and reason over magic though as my preferred method?