Would You Murder Everyone on Earth...If You Were God?

Surely you wouldn't. But kids, your Bible accuses God of doing just that in Noah's Flood of Genesis. "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the Earth," a regretful grieving God announces to himself before unleashing the Great Flood. Not so grieving though that he won't simply evaporate mankind out of existence; poof, you're all gone.

No, they must be liquidated. And look; it's pretty gruesome.

Imagine that rushing rising endless sea engulfing and sucking down every orphaned child and screaming baby and pregnant woman, every pathetic terrified soul clinging to anything that floats as they flail in the muck-filled water, their mouths and nostrils inhaling and choking and spitting the mud and foam, and imagine the mentally deficient, confused and helpless within this horror, and imagine the panicked parents abandoning this or that child as they flee to hopeless higher ground with stampeding horses and dogs and legions of vermin, ever higher to ever smaller patches of ground moated by the infinite corpse-clogged waters...

So much for the sanctity of human life, the innocence of animals...

Surely you'd find a way to teach the wicked little world a lesson without slowly drowning all but eight adults on a big boat filled with animals, wouldn't you? (How come every animal? If Noah could build a ship the size of a football field, and get two of every animal species on it, why not leave the sewer rats, wolverines, black widow spiders and tapeworms off, and take aboard a few more people instead?)

Now perhaps you're an enlightened enough or skeptical enough Christian who agrees that maybe The Bible Flood didn't happen as written, yes? Then how come you still believe the "core" of The Bible as written? You don't believe snails and snail kites and ants and anteaters climbed two by two aboard the Ark? But you believe that 2000 years ago a teenage virgin was impregnated by a ghost, had a child who was part god part man, and walked out of his own grave after he died? What special insight makes you arbiter of what's historic fact and what isn't in your holy book? How do you determine what's mythic, what's historic, what's symbolic, allegorical, poetic: faith?

You think the Flood's an exaggeration, an ancient Babylonian legend, an Israelite myth? If The Flood's a myth, then so's Noah. If Noah's a myth, then so's Adam. If Adam's a myth, so must the second Adam, Jesus, be.

If you were God, wouldn't you make all this clear?