It is interesting to note that this paradise (inevitably) fits the bill suggested for unbiblical religion in general. A positive afterlife outcome depends upon what a man does in this life.
Which pretty much harpoons your prior claim that they were trying to "deny having to give an account to God" by "deny[ing] an afterlife in which that account will be given".
Now that you know that you were completely wrong about Greek attitudes to the afterlife, would you like to try again?
Apparently they did go on believing that there would be bad stuff for the impious and good stuff for the pious. However,
while believing that, someone at some point, having been brought up knowing about the one God of Noah, decided to impiously invent polytheism, while continuing to teach that the wages of impiety were eternal suffering.
I am having trouble imagining such a man.
That's not quite how things are set up Dr.A. The OP questions how, given the flood and a surviving 8, we arrive at the current scenario. I'm merely pointing out the biblical narrative from the one assumed to the answer requested.
I think your answer is fallacious. Consider the following discussion:
Bob: Yesterday a ten ton weight fell on me. And then later that day someone cut my head off with a chainsaw.
Alice: But ... but if a ten-ton weight fell on you, why aren't you dead?
Bob: Why, if you'd been paying attention to what I've been saying, you'd have noticed that I also told you that someone cut my head off with a chainsaw. So you can see that I must be immune to injury, otherwise how could I be standing here?
Alice: But ... but I don't believe that you had your head cut off with a chainsaw, either. If anything, that claim seems even more implausible.
Bob: That's not quite how things are set up, Alice. You said: "
if" a ten-ton weight fell on me. You are therefore working through the consequences of the proposition that what I said is
true. Now the Boblical narrative
(see what I did there) also says that I survived having my head cut off by a chainsaw. We must therefore continue this discussion on the basis that I am in fact immune to injury.
Alice: But ... but ...
If you can see what's wrong with Bob's argument, you can see what's wrong with yours.
The children of Noah would have been born unbelievers and would have - until such time as they became believers (if at all) denied and perverted any truth of God to which they were exposed. Such is the nature of unbelievers. The Christians you speak of would be believers.
Which means you're comparing the actions of apples (for whom no evidence of God is enough) and pears (who, having faith, have all the evidence for God that they need).
But surely Noah and his children would have raised their descendants to believe in God.
They would have believed. If anyone in history would have totally believed in God, and thought that obeying him was vitally important, it would have been Noah and his children and their wives, who out of all mankind were saved because they did what God told them to do.
Naturally they would have raised their children to believe the same way. And people
do, overwhelmingly, believe what their parents raise them to believe. Religions don't change fast. Of all human ideas, they are the most immune to change. And yet it seems that Noah's descendants changed from believers in Noah's God to polytheistic idolaters even when they still had Noah around to tell them that they were wrong, not just as a matter of faith, but as a simple matter of fact. "There is one God," he could have said. "He wants you to do these things, he doesn't want you to do those things. He killed everyone in the world except me because they did those things. That's the sort of God he is.
I saw it. I was there".
And yet his descendants wouldn't have followed his religious beliefs even though it is manifestly the case that clinging on to the religious beliefs people were raised in is one of the most constant aspects of human nature?
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