Noah's Ark Quotes

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

I've never understood why people pick Noah's ark for a nursery theme anyway." Andrea said breezily... Really", I snorted. "I mean, who wants reminders of a natural disaster, literally of biblical portions, on their baby's walls? What are you supposed to say, 'Oh, drowning sinners, isn't that precious?

Shepherd Book: What are we up to, sweetheart? River: Fixing your Bible. Book: I, um... What? River: Bible's broken. Contradictions, false logistics - doesn't make sense. Shepherd Book: No, no. You-you-you can't... River: So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah's ark is a problem. Shepherd Book: Really? River: We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat. Shepherd Book: River, you don't fix the Bible. River: It's broken. It doesn't make sense. Book: It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you.

Tracy and I were among the few girls left in our class who hadn't made it to the table as Todd's girl of the moment. I'd never had the desire to be part of their demented version of Noah's Ark, where you could only survive if you were paired up with a member of the opposite sex. If I had to choose between dating Todd and missing the boat, I was fully prepared to drown.

We live in the age of Noah (a.s.) in the sense that a flood of distraction accosts us. It is a slow and subtle drowning. For those who notice it, they engage in the remembrance of God. The rites of worship and devotion to God's remembrance (dhikr) are planks of the ark. When Noah (a.s.) started to build his ark, his people mocked him and considered him a fool. But he kept building. He knew what was coming. And we know too.

Ego Tripping I was born in the congo I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light I am bad I sat on the throne drinking nectar with allah I got hot and sent an ice age to europe to cool my thirst My oldest daughter is nefertiti the tears from my birth pains created the nile I am a beautiful woman I gazed on the forest and burned out the sahara desert with a packet of goat's meat and a change of clothes I crossed it in two hours I am a gazelle so swift so swift you can't catch me For a birthday present when he was three I gave my son hannibal an elephant He gave me rome for mother's day My strength flows ever on My son noah built new/ark and I stood proudly at the helm as we sailed on a soft summer day I turned myself into myself and was jesus men intone my loving name All praises All praises I am the one who would save I sowed diamonds in my back yard My bowels deliver uranium the filings from my fingernails are semi-precious jewels On a trip north I caught a cold and blew My nose giving oil to the arab world I am so hip even my errors are correct I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal I cannot be comprehended except by my permission I mean...I...can fly like a bird in the sky...

Faith precedes the miracle. It has ever been so and shall ever be. It was not raining when Noah was commanded to build an ark. There was no visible ram in the thicket when Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. Two heavenly personages were not yet seen when Joseph knelt and prayed. First came the test of faith–and then the miracle. Remember that faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other. Cast out doubt. Cultivate faith.

My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak in which--the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her basket--Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded.

Be like Noah's dove. She made use of her wings to fly, but trust in the ark for safety.

When I was a little girl,' I said, sitting down, 'the wallpaper in my room had pictures of Noah's story.' [...] You know what's weird though? It's weird that the ark would be such a kids' story, you know? I mean, it's...really a story about death. Every person who isn't in Noah's family? They die. Every animal, apart from two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It's the worst tragedy ever,' I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest.[...] 'What the hell,'I said, 'pardon my language, was that doing on my wallpaper?

Quote for the day from an unknown author: "Don't ever question the value of volunteers: Noah's Ark was built by volunteers; the Titanic was built by porfessionals".

The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.

You cannot come to Christ unless the Spirit of God brings you. But what if you ignore His warnings? Then you are in the gravest danger, for some day God will no longer be speaking to you. Then it will be too late. Come to Christ while there is still time. Christ, God's greater Ark, stands ready to welcome you to safety today.

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

Where I'm at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah's Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?

Maya’s boyfriend, Ryan, happens to be the only other black kid in eleventh grade, and everybody expects us to be together. Because apparently when it’s two of us, we have to be on some Noah’s Ark type shit and pair up to preserve the blackness of our grade.

It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.

People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.

Anytime I see a rainbow, what comes into my mind is how skillful and talented someone was to create an ark that didn't leak through a prolong period of flood. We must work our talents out and work them out skillfully and then our rainbow of excellence will show.

If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.

I always liked the story of Noah's Ark and the idea of starting anew by rescuing the things you like and leaving the rest behind.

Among all the world's large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah's Ark.

The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining, and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology.

Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 per cent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah’s Ark.

We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?

The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?

In the end, Noah's labor resulted in far more than a simple ark that stayed afloat. All those hours co-laboring with God led to something far greater: a rainbow, a promise, a covenant between God and every living creature on earth.

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock.

It pays to plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. ” - Anon

If Noah waited for signs of rain to build an ark, he would have been swept away by the flood.

Noah built the ark to save animals, not lettuce. I take that to mean God approves of me eating a good steak.

How do you tell one You've spoken with God? / Would you believe someone / Who said that they saw / Plans for a boat / To hold all the beasts / And you and your kids From a flood to retreat?

Although my perception might have been distorted by melancholy, it seemed to me that most of those people were in pairs, the larger percentage of them holding hands, as if they were extras in a movie of high romance, accessorizing a scene for which the director's purpose might have been to say that life was a parade lived two-by-two, as it had been since before Noah's fabled ark and as it would be always.

Much of [John Hanning] Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of Nile is devoted to descriptions of the physical and moral ugliness of Africa's "primitive races," in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." For his text, Speke took the story in Genesis 9, which tells how Noah, when he was just six hundred years old and had safely skippered his ark over the flood to dry land, got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. On emerging from his oblivion, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked; that Ham had told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, of the spectacle; and that Shem and Japheth had, with their backs chastely turned, covered the old man with a garment. Noah responded by cursing the progeny of Ham's son, Canaan, saying, "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." Amid the perplexities of Genesis, this is one of the most enigmatic stories, and it has been subjected to many bewildering interpretations--most notably that Ham was the original black man. To the gentry of the American South, the weird tale of Noah's curse justified slavery, and to Spake and his colonial contemporaries it spelled the history of Africa's peoples. On "contemplating these sons of Noah," he marveled that "as they were then, so they appear to be now.

When you do drugs, you count like a chemist: The numbers are wild, the formulas are easy. Then, when you try to get clean, you start to count like a pharmacist: How many hours between doses? How much or how little do you need to maintain? Then, when you finally give it up completely, you count like Noah in his dinky, seafaring ark full of pairs of every animal in God's creation: You count days. You wait for the rain to stop, for the sky to clear, for life to ever seem normal again. And then eventually it does. Then you start to count how many cups of black coffee you need just to get through every day, how many cigarettes you smoke. You know the address of every Starbucks in a mile radius, which is easy because there so many, and you know the names of every restaurant where they allow you to smoke, which is easy because they are so few.

The air was rank, and on my left, in a broad green meadow, arranged neatly in pairs, were dead lions and dead walruses and dead gazelles. It was like some horrible parade leading towards a cruel parody of Noah's ark, a ship for everything that was gone and never coming back, everything that would not be saved.

We should expect nothing less from the language that was originally given by God, to His human family. Hebrew was the method that God chose for mankind to speak to Him, and Him to them. Adam spoke Hebrew—and your Bible confirms this. Everyone who got off the ark spoke one language—Hebrew. Even Abraham spoke Hebrew. Where did Abraham learn to speak Hebrew? Abraham was descended from Noah’s son, Shem. (Ge 11:10-26) Shem’s household was not affected by the later confusion of languages, at Babel. (Ge 11:5-9) To the contrary, Shem was blessed while the rest of Babel was cursed. (Ge 9:26) That is how Abraham retained Hebrew, despite residing in Babylon. So, Shem’s language can be traced back to Adam. (Ge 11:1) And, Shem (Noah’s son) was still alive when Jacob and Esau was 30 years of age. Obviously, Hebrew (the original language) was clearly spoken by Jacob’s sons. (Ge 14:13)

It’s hard, since Noah, not to see a rainbow as a sign of hope.

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Christians who compromise on millions of years can encourage others toward unbelief concerning God’s Word and the gospel.

Don't ever question the value of volunteers. Noah's Ark was built by volunteers; the Titanic was built by professionals.

Among all the world's large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah's Ark

On Noah's Ark, there were three kinds of beings. The Ark itself which is the plant mind, the animal mind and the human mind. All are living beings, therefore also having a soul.

Noah's ark is on the tombstone of drowning desire and I am walking furiously on water.

The ark was like a portable computer hard drive and Noah was a one-man Geek Squad, and he dumped God's most important files onto it before he zorched the virus-ridden computer that was the world.

Many of those who accuse the Christian God of being a “genocidal god” because of the Flood, support the genocidal killing of millions of children in their mother’s wombs, which is a double standard fallacy!

He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark. But God withheld the flood.

I was not a great man whose history has been recorded for children to study in school. No bells will ring for me, no flags descend upon their mast. For I was an ordinary man, my son, one of many, with ordinary hopes and ordinary dreams and ordinary fears. I, too, dreamed of wealth and riches, health and strength. I, too, feared hunger and poverty, war and weakness. I was the neighbour who lived in the next house. The man standing in the subway on his way to work: who held a match to his cigarette: who walked with his dog. I was the soldier shaking with fear: the man berating the umpire at the ball game: the citizen in the privacy of the voting booth, happily electing the worthless candidate. I was the man who lived a thousand times and died a thousand times in all man’s six thousand years of record. I was the man who sailed with Noah  in his ark, who was the multitude that crossed the sea that Moses held apart, who hung from the cross next to Christ. I was the ordinary man about whom songs are never written, stories are never told, legends are never remembered.

In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah. You’re on the ark. Yeah, you’re okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. That’s not a happy moment for Noah.” By

Revenge is a color, a color that never fades. A beautiful color. It is the color of the sky at dawn when lovers are hauled out of their beds and garroted in the middle of the street; the color of the ancient sea when Noah’s Ark has been breached below the water line; the color of Jacob’s Ladder as it collapses while Jacob has climbed only half-way to heaven. But it is more than that, much more. It contains the pigment that colors the eyes of the lovers that betray you.

Unfortunately, no one has ever successfully postulated a super-symmetry holding between two known particles. Instead, in all the supersymmetric theories the numbers of particles are at least doubled. A new superpartner is simply postulated to go along with each known particle. Not only are there squarks and sleptons and photinos, there are also sneutrinos to partner the neutrinos, Higgsinos with the Higgs, and gravitinos to go with the gravitons. Two by two, a regular Noah's ark of particles. Sooner or later, tangled in the web of new snames and naminos, you begin to feel like Sbozo the clown. Or Bozo the clownino. Or swhatever.

It was not the first time people had taken a good square look at Armaggedon and decided that they would prefer it to happen to somebody else. Ever since Noah built the Ark, the seductive notion that it is possible to opt out, to stand on the sidelines whilst global cataclysm passess you by, has exercised a strong pull.

From my chair I had a clear view of Hobie’s Noah’s Ark: paired elephants, zebras, carven beasts marching two by two, clear down to tiny hen and rooster and the bunnies and mice bringing up the rear. And the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon: rain streaming down the skylights, the homely file of creatures lined on the kitchen counter waiting to be saved. Noah: the great conservator, the great caretaker. “And—” he’d gotten up to make some coffee—“I

For all the contradictions of the present-day world, for all the diversity of social and political systems in it, and for all the different choices made by the nations in different times, this world is nevertheless one whole. We are all passengers aboard one ship, the Earth, and we must not allow it to be wrecked. There will be no second Noah's Ark.

Noah’s family and various beasts and fowl enter the ark—The Flood comes, and water covers the whole earth—All other life that breathes is destroyed.

Science is the Noah’s Ark very itself! Seek no other vessel!

The best of Milton is in his epic ... Must Noah always figure in our minds drunk and naked, never building the Ark?

It was the titanic that sank and the ark that floated.

Greta huffed at Taryn. “In my day mates weren’t allowed to live together until after the mating ceremony.” “In your day a guy named Noah was building an ark.

Blaming public Christians for being ‘too political’ is like blaming Noah’s ark for being ‘too wet

> Do you need to build an ark? > Because I Noah guy.

Grahamites." She makes a face. "So concerned with niche and nature. So focused on their Noah's ark, after the flood has already happened." Anderson thinks of Hagg, sweating and distressed at the destruction caused by ivory beetle. "If they could, they'd keep us all on our own continents." "It is impossible, I think. People like to expand. To fill new niches.

The Flood ceases—Noah sends forth a dove, which returns with an olive leaf—He releases all living things from the ark—He offers sacrifices—Seedtime, harvest, and seasons are ensured.

The rats are terrible fellows for gnawing whatever they come across; and I have heard unfortunate tuli-growers complain most bitterly of Noah for having put a couple of rats in the ark.

I could almost picture how when God was reaching down and closing the door of the ark, Noah might have been in there standing on tiptoe trying to see out for as long as he could. The Bible says Noah was six hundred years old when he went into the ark. I bet he noticed things in that last minute that he hadn’t paid any attention at all to for the last five hundred fifty years. I

Fossils do not require long ages to form. In fact, they must form quickly, otherwise the organism’s softer tissues and even bones suffer decay (shells or teeth enamel naturally take longer to disintegrate).

About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah’s ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world’s population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That’s kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God’s math works! Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don’t have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t . . . where "A " is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P " is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r " is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n " is the number of compoundings a year (1 in this case), and "t " is the total number of years (4,400 in this case).

Sharks are not creatures of God. Noah did not bring any fucking sharks along on his ark; sea creatures have to be more the Devil’s. Thriving there in the low, cold, dark depths. That’s why Jesus was a fisherman. He killed fish.

In fairness to the Almighty, though, it should be noted that lack of attention from God is not necessarily a bad thing, as the former residents of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the entirety of the Earth prior to Noah’s construction of an ark would have been able to attest. This would run counter to the desires of many former occupants of London who would have been delighted to see London, upon their departure, erupt in a tower of flame, cleansed by the wrath of God . . . .

Creationists hold to an Ice Age that was triggered by the Flood. The Flood occurred about 2348 b.c., which is about 4,300 years ago.1 The secularists’ most recent ice age was supposedly about 10,000 years ago (by their dating system).

Almost all voyages, from that of Noah’s Ark to the sending of the ships to Troy, have been marked by interminable delays, with false starts and turning wind and tide; perhaps the schooner Ringle was too slim and slight to count as a worthy adversary, because she gently sailed her anchor out of the ground and then bore away a little east of north with a wind that allowed her to spread every sail she possessed, other than those reserved for foul or very foul weather.

The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved”—his voice was rising—“not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be the light.

The sons of God marry the daughters of men—Men turn to wickedness, the earth is filled with violence, and all flesh is corrupted—The Flood is promised—God establishes His covenant with Noah, who builds an ark to save his family and various living things.

Some people want to put restrictions on themselves according to their talent, intelligence, or experience. Others worry about their age. But with God, one person can always make a difference, regardless of circumstances or situation. And age means nothing to Him. When Jesus fed the five thousand, a boy provided the loaves and fishes (John 6:1-13). And in the case of Noah, when it began to rain and he entered the ark, he was six hundred years old! You’re never too old—or too young—to make a difference for God.

The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men’s House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility … The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community “leaders” without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream—the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah’s Ark but who yet were drunk on finance.

Resting in the calm eye of a storm raging all around him, Noah is saved in the ark as the flood surges over the land. In the flood narrative it is God who saves Noah from God. In the midst of the torrent of his own raging justice God places a floating ship of mercy.

God told him exactly how to build it--how long, how tall, how wide, and even the type of wood to use. When the ark was finished, God told Noah to put every kind of animal in it." "I wish he would have left out the spiders and snakes!" Lulu quips from her bed, wrinkling her nose in obvious disgust.

Every Christian school must adopt an implicit, absolute, childlike wonder at the glory of the Scriptures. We must be people of the Book, knowing it top to bottom, front to back. And we must resolve, before the fact, to have absolutely no problem with any passage of Scripture once the meaning of that passage has been ascertained through honest exegesis. This means, among other things, that Christians must be prepared to condemn sodomy, embrace the doctrine of creation, say that husbands are the heads of their wives, believe in giants and dragons, and believe in Noah’s ark right down to, if necessary, the giraffe’s head sticking out the window.

Thus God will destroy the wicked from off the earth. But the righteous will be preserved in the midst of these commotions, as Noah was preserved in the ark. God will be their refuge, and under his wings shall they trust. Says the psalmist: “Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee.” Psalm 91:9, 10. “In the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me.” Psalm 27:5. God’s promise is, “Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known My name.” Psalm 91:14. [111]

If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

Some find it difficult to withstand the mocking and unsavory remarks of foolish ones who ridicule chastity, honesty, and obedience to God’s commands. But the world has ever belittled adherence to principle. When Noah was instructed to build an ark, the foolish populace looked at the cloudless sky, then scoffed and jeered—until the rain came.

But surely the commute that defines the era was Noah's voyage aboard his eponymous ark, and to this day it remains the most epic commuting story ever told. As most people know, God felt that Earth had essentially "jumped the shark" (or "raped the angel" as they used to say back then), so rather than try to fix it, He instead decided to simply wash everyone away in a great flood and start over from scratch--just as you might do to your computer's hard drive if it has a really bad virus. So God spoke to Noah and commanded him to build an ark, aboard which he'd carry two of every animal in the world....Thus was born humankind's lust for gigantic vehicles, for God's instructions to Noah were basically the world's first car commercial, and the sales pitch was this: Large vehicles are your salvation.

As Noah looked upon the powerful beasts of prey that came forth with him from the ark, he feared that his family, numbering only eight persons, would be destroyed by them. But the Lord sent an angel to his servant with the assuring message: “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” Before this time God had given man no permission to eat animal food; he intended that the race should subsist wholly upon the productions of the earth; but now that every green thing had been destroyed, he allowed them to eat the flesh of the clean beasts that had been preserved in the ark.

given men warning of coming judgments. Those who had faith in His message for their time, and who acted out their faith, in obedience to His commandments, escaped the judgments that fell upon the disobedient and unbelieving. The word came to Noah, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me.” Noah obeyed and was saved. The message came to Lot, “Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city.” Genesis 7:1; 19:14. Lot placed himself under the guardianship of the heavenly messengers, and was saved. So Christ’s disciples were given warning of the destruction of Jerusalem. Those who watched for the sign of the coming ruin, and fled from the city, escaped the destruction. So now we are given warning of Christ’s second coming and of the destruction to fall upon the world. Those who heed the warning will be saved.

Part of it seems like how these Americans grew up. They collect things. So Tony Curtis or Tony Orlando will show up at Mantana’s and they all ask him for this autograph business, which is him signing his name on a napkin. And they cling to it, and collect it like they’ll never see Tony Curtis again. Now Chuck is taking things home, collecting them like he had to make sure they were safe. I don’t know what he has to protect a coffee cup from. Or five boxes of rubber bands, a picture of Farrah Fawcett, a picture of President Carter or a box full of liquor as if they don’t have liquor in America. Or a sculpture of a Rastaman grabbing on to his an erect penis, the head bigger than his actual head. The man must think he is Noah saving a statue of a Rasta with a huge cock for his ark. If he’s saving that fucking sculpture and don’t plan to save me I swear to God I will kill him.

If Mr. Castillo had been in charge of building the Ark, Noah would have wound up with a boat the size of the New Jersey." "It still wouldn't have been big enough for all those animals," said Freddie. "Honestly, Freddie," I said. "Don't you know a joke when you hear one?" "Sure," he said. "Just the same, Val, with the few people the Ark had aboard, there wouldn't be enough of them to shovel all the-" I threw a pine cone at him and chased him back to camp.

It was to Noah that God gave instructions to make an ark in which he was to be rescued from the devastation of the Flood, together with his family, that is, his wife, his sons and daughters-in-law, and also the animals that went into the ark in accordance with God’s directions. Without doubt this is a symbol of the City of God on pilgrimage in this world, of the Church which is saved through the wood on which was suspended ‘the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’.

You see, Noah got drunk this one time on the Ark, and he was a-layin on his bed, naked as a jaybird. Two of his sons wouldn’t look at him, they just turned the other way and put a blanket over him. I don’t know, it might’ve been a sheet. But Ham—he was the coon of the family—looked on his father in his nakedness, and God cursed him and all his race to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. So there it is. That’s what’s behind it. Genesis, chapter nine. You go on and look it up, Mr. Amberson.

is the “waters” of the celestial “ocean” which come to mind, in which Noah’s Ark now swims as a constellation. In the Indian version of this story the ark is a boat on which the Seven Rishis (better known to us as the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major), and the Vedic culture that they represent, are ferried to safety by a giant Fish (the constellation Pisces). Gazing on myth from this angle we can find in the skies many of the cast of characters of “The Greatness of Saturn.” Aditi [* FOOTNOTE: A well-thought-out cosmology which catalogues such extensions of ‘Earth’ into ‘Space’ is presented by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Namlet’s Mill, and the interested reader will find a wealth of detail worth pondering in that book.] (‘The Unbroken, Unbounded One’; by extension, eternity) is the mother of the devas, the ‘shining celestials,’ and Diti (‘The Bound, Divided, Cut One’) is the mother of the asuras, the enemies of the devas. There is good reason to believe that Aditi represents the northern celestial hemisphere and the zodiac, which being the part of the heavens that is visible throughout the year

This unusual situation is due to the fact that the tablet omits all outbreaks of the conventional literary structure – Anu opened his mouth to speak, saying to the lady Ishtar … followed by Ishtar opened her mouth to speak, saying to her father, Anu … Gilgamesh VI: 87–88; 92–93 – with which Babylonian narrative literature is, not to put too fine a point on it, slightly tiresomely littered. In fact, I cannot come up with another example of Babylonian mythological or epic literature that is devoid of this characteristic speech-linking device. Its repetitive nature at first sight looks like a remnant of oral literature, where things are repeated more than we would repeat them today, which the modern connoisseur of cuneiform literature just has to accept, or appreciate as atmospheric and authentic. On reflection, however, it is just the opposite. The characteristic dependence on this formula originates in the very transition from oral to written literature, for who is speaking at any one time will always be clear in a storyteller’s presentation, but the process of writing down what has previously been spoken aloud creates ambiguity for the reader unless each speaker is clearly identified.

Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark. Part Two The Agricultural Revolution 11.

That hundreds of millions of people believe that a man named Noah built an ark and put all of the world's species onto it two-by-two, that those species included dinosaurs—even though dinosaurs and man are separated by millions of years—that these people want this taught as science, that they want to get onto every school board and into every legislature to ensure that their view prevails, and that the mainstream media of a modern society continues to take this seriously, may only mildly annoy one smart person, perhaps one who grew up in religion and is tempted to give religion a pass. But it will seriously outrage—and almost derange—another smart person who is convinced that these views always come with an authoritarian edge and a coercive public agenda. It will likewise strike a smart person as a ludicrous claim that the collectivist farms in her country are working beautifully when there is no food to be found on the shelves of any grocery store anywhere or to claim that a certain corporation is a mighty source for good and innovation when it is paying its employees peanuts and freely polluting. Misrepresentations of this sort affect our brain and our nervous system. They are an assault on our senses as well as our sense of right and wrong, and they bring pain and distress.

Do you know the story of Noah and his sons, child? How they filled their ship with everything to start the world anew? For a thousand years your city, this crumbling capital”—he waves a hand toward a window—“was like that ark. Only instead of two of every living creature, do you know what the good Lord stacked inside this ship?” Beyond the shuttered window the first cocks crow. She can feel Himerius twitching beside the fire, all his attention on the silver. “Books.” The scribe smiles. “And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?” She shakes her head. “Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The

Maybe! That’s the moral of many, many stories. Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything, as the shared society and negotiated order of the household reveals itself as inadequate, or disintegrates, in the face of the unexpected and threatening. Everybody whistles in the dark, instead. Communication would require admission of terrible emotions: resentment, terror, loneliness, despair, jealousy, frustration, hatred, boredom. Moment by moment, it’s easier to keep the peace. But in the background, in Billy Bixbee’s house, and in all that are like it, the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. It lifts the very household from its foundations. Then it’s an affair, or a decades-long custody dispute of ruinous economic and psychological proportions. Then it’s the concentrated version of the acrimony that could have been spread out, tolerably, issue by issue, over the years of the pseudo-paradise of the marriage. Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrific closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything. There’s no ark, because no one built one, even though everyone felt the storm gathering.

Beautiful Maria, how Sweet are your hips... Is the man whom you love never to find that out? Beautiful Maria, listen to what I say to you: only a little to one side of this way, a flight of stairs leads steeply upward, leading to freedom... Your knees are trembling... how sweet that is! Do you think to overcome your weakness by clasping your hands? You call upon God, but believe me: God does not hear you! Since I came upon the earth as the great flood, to destroy all in existence but Noah’s ark, God has been deaf to the scream of His creatures.  Or did you think I had forgotten how the mothers screamed then? Have you more responsibility on your conscience than God on His? Turn back, beautiful Maria, turn back!

The final misconception is that evolution is “just a theory.” I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that evolution is unproven, because (following an unuseful convention in the field) it is a “theory” (like, say, germ theory). Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: Numerous examples where changing selective pressures have changed gene frequencies in populations within generations (e.g., bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance). Moreover, there are also examples (mostly insects, given their short generation times) of a species in the process of splitting into two. Voluminous fossil evidence of intermediate forms in numerous taxonomic lineages. Molecular evidence. We share ~98 percent of our genes with the other apes, ~96 percent with monkeys, ~75 percent with dogs, ~20 percent with fruit flies. This indicates that our last common ancestor with other apes lived more recently than our last common ancestor with monkeys, and so on. Geographic evidence. To use Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with a fundamentalist insisting that all species emerged in their current forms from Noah’s ark—how come all thirty-seven species of lemurs that made landfall on Mt. Ararat in the Armenian highlands hiked over to Madagascar, none dying and leaving fossils in transit? Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal.

Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

Noah had grown tired of being a prophet of doom, forever announcing a catastrophe that never came and that no one took seriously. One day, he clothed himself in sackcloth and covered his head with ashes. Only a man who was mourning [the death of] a beloved child or his wife was allowed to do this. Clothed in the garb of truth, bearer of sorrow, he went back to the city, resolved to turn the curiosity, spitefulness, and superstition of its inhabitants to his advantage. Soon a small crowd of curious people had gathered around him. They asked him questions. They asked if someone had died, and who the dead person was. Noah replied to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: “Tomorrow.” Profiting from their attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words: “The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that will have been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed. When the flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And so there will no longer be any difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be too late.” With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That evening a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: “Let me help you build the ark, so that it may become false.” Later a roofer joined them, saying: “It is raining over the mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false.”14