Religious questions - No Trolls allowed!

[Darkness Productions]

Ok, since this is the lounge, I figured what better place to strike up this conversation...

This page on Wikipedia about Methuselah (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Methuselah&oldid=180258438) states that he lived for 969 years. I'm not going to debate that, but something in the article caught my eye:


Assuming Adam's life began at the time of creation, Adam was alive when Methuselah was born. This makes Methuselah the human link between Adam and Noah (Assuming Methuselah died at the time of the flood, or at least after Noah's birth).

What does it mean when they state that Methuselah was the human link? Does that imply that since these people lived for hundreds of years, that they weren't human?

Next; Noah. This Wikipedia page about the Flood (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deluge_%28mythology%29&oldid=180352895#Hebrew) has the following information:


The record in the book of Genesis says, "The LORD said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.'"

and


God commands Noah to put one pair of unclean animals and seven pairs of clean animals.

also


God selects Noah who "found favor in the eyes of the LORD"[5] and commands him to build an ark.

If God was sorry that he made the animals, and his 'plan' was to "blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky", why did he have Noah put a pair (sometimes more) of all of them on the ark? To me, that says his intention was to kill it all, and essentially start over.

In the final quote above, what was it that Noah did to find favor in the eyes of the LORD?

I'm not trying to start a flame war, or anything of the like. If you don't know the answer, or don't have anything constructive to post, please don't bother. I'm not a religious person, just someone trying to understand 'history'.

Thanks!

[Helix_Von_Smelix]

why couldn't GOD "click" his fingers and make the "evil" humans disapear? Also how could we be made imperfect (by GOD) in the first place?

Also why did Noah beat his son's when they found him drunk and naked. They covered him up, put him to bed. He woke in the morning and beat them.


Humans were supposed to live for 1,000 years, then as GOD's first punishment that was reduced. Then GOD had a go at drowning us!!

:santa:

Good topic, lets hope it stays clean and happy

[Fozzie]

versed in this subject but the way I see it is this.

God/omnipotent being created "man" in his image, but we all know that no matter how powerful the being the image will not be as perfect as the original.

Now God had a disagreement with some folk in heaven and cast them out. Heaven is supposed to be a pretty perfect place to be and the ones cast out were pretty peaved about it and thought they would mess things up for God on his pet project and started fiddling around with things on Earth.

Then we have a massive power struggle between God trying to fix things and Satan trying to p1ss God off by messing it up.

There is no reason to think that Satan also had a go at perverting the animal kingdom too.

So God got to the stage where a full format was required but decided to backup some of his data before flushing the rest down the pan.

As you say if God really wanted to redo the Earth he should have just grabbed Earth 1.0 and lobbed it into the Sun and created a new one fom scratch.

Creationism and religion has always had too many holes, when the population was mainly ignorant and was brow beaten by the "learned" clergy these inconsistencies coukld be glossed over. Nowadays free thinking people can see them for what they are glorified social clubs.

If people want to go and have a social time with similar thinking individuals then that's fine.

[Paratima]

Most of the folks who wrote the Old Testament were just up from cave men and not very far up at that. They were trying to figure out the world and record what they had figured and use it to teach the young and keep people in line. Their God was a small, local, personal God, a whole lot like the guy next door, only bigger and stronger and given to the same occasional temper tantrums. Big and strong enough to create Earth, but not anywhere near big enough to create a Universe of a hundred billion galaxies, of 1 to 100 billion star systems each. Their ignorance was far-reaching and all-encompassing. When they told stories, they exaggerated stuff for effect, just like we do. If you try to be too logical about it, it falls apart.

[jasong]

I, for one, believe in God. Specifically, I believe in Jesus Christ. Just because a bunch of intellectuals(I'm not talking about anyone in particular) claim that believing in God is stupid doesn't make it so, not by a long shot.

People can believe what they want, and maybe change the laws of the country to suit the people in that area, but nothing they do will prove or disprove the existence of God. If God exists, He probably isn't bothered by the fact that people don't believe He exists. For that matter, the Devil doesn't mind either, you're not going to try to fight an enemy if you don't believe it exists.

As for the flood, people have different opinions of why it happened. I, personally, have considered the possibility that it's prophecy rather than history. I'm not super-familiar with that part of the Bible, so I've considered the possibility that it's a future event that is described in the past tense.