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Originally Posted by golfing eagles
Seriously??? "Fallen angels" mating with human females creating "giants"??? "No doubt" a reason for the "great flood"???
Here's a better reason-----Melting glaciers and ice caps during the warming that followed the last cycle of glaciation. Hence, ancient coastal cities built prior such as those off India, Japan, and possibly Mexico are now under water.
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Sounds reasonable. What makes it so is that the Christian Bible is far from the only record of a great flood. Virtually all of the ancient Mesopotamian religions had such a story, the first (as far as we know) being an account in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is at least 5,000 years old and predates what became Judaism by at least one millennium and probably more.
There are so many parallels between the Biblical account of Noah and the Epic of Gilgamesh that to deny the relationship is totally illogical. The Epic of Gilgamesh had it's own ark-builder in Uta-napishti. Like Noah, Uta-napishti was given instructions by his deity as to the dimensions of his ark. Like Noah, Uta-napishti was commanded to “Take on board the boat all living things’ seed”. Both Noah's and Uta-Napishti's respective arks landed on a mountain: for Moses it was "Mount Ararat, 300 miles away from Mount Nisir, the mountain where Uta-napishti’s boat is thought to have landed". ("Noah’s Ark and the Epic of Gilgamesh: A Comparison", Hannah Bird, Fellowship and Fairydust). Similar accounts exist in all the Abrahamic religions as well as many others in that part of the world. There are even flood accounts in lands as widespread as India and Central America.
Of course, no matter what religion claims the account of the flood, the adherents will say that the fact that it was so widespread is merely (or actually?) proof that it WAS caused by God. But then you get into the swamp of trying to decide just WHICH God: If all have equal claim, then which one takes precedence? Good luck with that!
This is a common pitfall, in my mind, that comes with taking the Bible as the literal and complete Word of God. Biblical "truth" is NOT found in the blow-by-blow descriptions of events that may or may not have happened two, three, four or more millennia ago, but the lesson, in the case of Noah and the Ark, that one derives from it--that knowingly living in a state of sin can have fatal consequences apart from hellfire and damnation. The Biblical account of the Great Flood is a sterling example of that, but there are many, many others.