Summations Only

How about establishing that the God of the Israelites is very powerful? How about claiming that a local story about gods flooding the known world was actually done by the God of the Israelites? There are religions that date older than any known copy of Genesis. Yes. The agenda is to show that Yahweh is powerful enough to kill us all. The agenda is to take the flood story that is prevalent throughout the near east and make it all down to Yahweh. Its agenda is to show that the descendants of Noah (and specifically Shem, the ancestor of Abraham) are especially blessed as being historically holy/pure/moral. Its agenda is to suggest that bad things happen because of bad behaviour courtesy of Yahweh.Genesis is filled with agendas. The Flood story is not an exception, I'm afraid.The question I'm forced to ask is. Is it your position that the claimed lack of agenda in Genesis is evidence that a flood happened and it happened in recent times? If so, please show your chain of reasoning that leads there.I'll give it a go:1. There is no evidence of an agenda in the flood account.
2. All false stories have an agenda.
3. Therefore, the flood account is not a false story.I would disagree with both (1) and (2), and therefore argue that (3) has not been established.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

They existed at the time of the earliest copy of Genesis that we have. I have no idea what relevance this has. But they do report a flood that covered all the land (whatever that is) and they do discuss one man and his family being saved by divine intervention. I'm not suggesting it was given any special treatment, so I don't know why you say this. What I actually said was that the agenda is to show that the Ancestor of the Israelites was specially chosen for their moral superiority. I don't see any such factual historical marks. That's besides the point I was raising. Are you suggesting that the lack of an agenda is evidence in favour of the story? Even if we assume the story is true, it can still have an agenda: Telling a true story is itself evidence of an agenda of truth-telling.

But nevertheless, there is no evidence that is known that dates the story to before any religions, as you claimed. I don't think the default position for the claims of a religious document should be 'generally credible' when they are talking about such incredible things. No I didn't. I implied that the agenda was to propose the origins of the Israelites were from a family that was close to Yahweh, that the story glorifies Yahweh as a powerful figure and other such things. This thread is not a discussion about whether the flood was global or regional. I couldn't care less about that issue right at this moment. If we accept that it was a regional flood, we are still left with the issue of evidence for this flood.The evidence I've seen you present, that I specifically take issue with, is that there is no agenda to the flood story which is somehow an indicator of its truth and the claim that the story predates religion, which is an unevidenced claim.

quote:

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This is the history of the generations of Noach. Noach was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time. Noach walked with God.

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That's why I was talking about the Israelites, not the Jews. No I'm not confusing my bibles. I was just pointing out that there are many possible agendas that can be inferred from the existence of the text. It is not free of agenda. How do you know it is fantastically and astonishingly accurate? This is not a claim that can be made for historical documents, except in the cases where there happens to be physical evidence to back them up.So far you've mentioned no physical evidence, just the documents. How do you know these documents are reliable? It seems clear to me the authors had an agenda, and there is no reason to think that agenda is to tell the complete truth.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.