A Cute and Cuddly Bedtime Story of Mass Extinction

by: Jon

Just how does mass genocidal extinction become a cute and cuddly bed-time story?

When it's a bible story, that's how.

There are hundreds of children's storybooks, puzzles, games, videos, wallpaper, and toys all depicting Noah's Ark with all his happy smiling animals friends... oh, look! Cute furry bunnies!

Somehow, the rest of the story just doesn't matter. You know, the part where everyone else on the planet DROWNS TO DEATH.

Here is my more accurate portrayal of the flood story:



Sure, 40 days and 40 nights of rain that covers the globe would have eroded every mountain down to a nub, never mind wherever the water came from or where it all went. Forget the fact that such a deluge of water would have diluted the saltwater oceans, destroying the ecosystems and turning them into a barren waste. Don't concern yourself with what the animals ate after they got off the ark, either, since all the plants around the world would have also died... and the carnivores would have finished off everything in the ark in a matter of days. And it isn't important to figure out how the marsupials got back to Australia, the penguins to Antarctica, and so on.

Of course the story makes no sense, but that's not the point.

The point is that this is a story where God comes right out and KILLS everyone because they aren't doing what he wants them to, and then this story is turned into a lovable and cuddly cartoon. This is the bits of the story they don't include in the childrens videos. It's all there. Go read your Bible.

Genesis 6

Angels and humans are getting awfully "friendly" and the resulting half-breed offspring are called "Nephilim." Sounds like something from a L. Ron Hubbard novel.

God sees that everyone is wicked and violent, and he doesn't like violence... so he decides to murder everyone.

But God likes Noah, so he tells him to build an ark, tells him how many animals to put on it, and to put his family aboard. Also, Noah is 600 years old.

Forgetting for a moment the blind hypocrisy of Gods action here, it's interesting that his plan will kill all the animals, too, who are, after all, only doing what he created them to do.

So the waters come, everyone jumps in the boat, the entire earth is covered, and everything dies. EVERYTHING.

The wind started to blow and the water gradually began to disappear... off the edge of the earth, I guess, I don't know.

It takes several months, but they can finally see mountain tops. Noah sends out a dove who brings back an olive branch, and that's how Noah knows there's dry land.

So they land, and the animals scamper out of the ark. God never seems to notice that the animals still eat each other and such, but whatever. Noah kills some animals and offers them as a sacrifice... because God hates violence, remember. God says the barbeque smells really good (Yes, it's there: Genesis 8:21) and now he feels bad, so he promises that he'll never kill everything again. I guess he learned a valuable moral lesson!

He tells Noah to go ahead and eat anything he wants. Since God hates violence, he tells Noah to enforce capital punishment, eye for an eye, etc.. God again promises not to kill everything, but this time he says he won't *flood* everything again. Ah-ha! A loophole! Next time, it's FIRE! Suckers!

But God seems worried he might forget that he promised not to drown everyone, though, so he invents rainbows. Apparently the physical laws of light defraction didn't exist until that moment. Now, every time he sees a rainbow, he'll remember he isn't supposed to drown everything.

Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, and passes out naked. His youngest son sees him and tells his two older brothers, who go to great lengths to cover him up without ever having to actually look at his 600 year old nakedness. Noah wakes up and, in what seems to be a drunken rant, condemns his youngest sons family to slavery for... whatever it was he did.

Yup... Noah was a drunk, his family dysfunctional, and their inbreeding repopulated the planet. Noah dies 350 years later, now nearly 1,000 years old. It's surprising he didn't leave a bigger footprint in history.

The end.

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So... how is this a good story, much less a reasonable one? God doesn't like the way people turned out, so he can just wipe them out? Isn't this a lesson of terror and intimidation? And it's being sent straight to our kids, as if it's no big deal.

I was raised with this story as literal truth. I can't imagine that this is how we want our kids to grow up... to be afraid and terrorized. Christians talk about their God of love... but I don't actually see much of him in the Bible.