Russian Scientists Say No Noah’s Arc on Mount Ararat

No giant boat on Ararat, but the good thing is that it wont deter the true believers so I still can get some good laughs out of their books, articles, etc.

:hi:

it has to be me.

my dad has photos of the so-called remains of the ark, he actually put them in my face.

I had to just walk away.

and you ARE cute.

:hi:

those movie length documentaries from the late 80s and 70s on things like Noah's Ark, Bigfoot, UFOs etc is that there is snow and ice on Ararat. Also if I recall there is a glacier and a lot of the reports tend to have it above the snow line so I guess they think the ice would have preserved it.

I think you're cute! :hi:

The Invasion of Godless Russia is just around the corner now.

Bearing a million dead gay penguin trophies and with Terri Schiavo riding at the head of the tank column in a sedan chair, the Armies of United States of Jesusland will scourge godless Russia from the Earth.

Nostradamus predicted this. Hell it's even in the Da Vinci Code.

And if they'd found old pieces of a boat, it would still just be old pieces of a boat

and the fact that there are on this mountain would make it a little strange.

sway the belief of the faithful. Noah's Ark IS THERE because they BELIEVE it's there. That's all the proof they need.

The Russians didn't have to waste a trip, I could have told them there wasn't anything there. :eyes:

Must have been simulateous Divine inspiration.

O8)

Suppose they aren't using Texas Board of Regents approved biology textbooks either. No creation science.

The might hand of W will smite them for their blasphemy!

:nuke:

Fundamentalists have once again stacked the Kansas Board of Education in their favor. They've re-written the science standards rules to down-play evolution and have inserted "alternative" ideas. Some of the revisions are pretty radical and ignorant, and obviously not written by scientists. The ultra-conservative attorney general of the state met secretly with the 6 (of 10) conservative members in two, 1 on 3 sessions (to avoid the Kansas open meeting law), prior to these revisions. The revisions are at...

http://www.kansasscience2005.com/ProposedRevisions_KSstandards.pdf

In early May, public input is invited. However, it is considered a sham with the decisions pre-determined by the fundamentalist majority. The Standards Writing Committee and virtually all scientific organizations in Kansas are furious. A statewide boycott of the hearings has been called by the Kansas Citizens for Sciences, which is the watchdog organization. Details will eventually be posted at...

http://www.kcfs.org

A lot more to come in April, no doubt

to try and discredit the science behind this discovery.

The ark is there, but God temporarily turned it invisible so that the Russian scientists only saw a rock formation. The ways of the Lord are mysterious.

Over there to the left of Thor's hammer.

And he does have a hammer, a big one!

I used to watch him on TV when I was a kid.

He's havin a good laugh o'er this

is possibly true in part. I admit my assertion is mostly based on a willingness to believe a limited number of scientific publications on the possibility of a catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea basin.

I can imagine how a story of escaping such a flooding with water advance a mile or two every day could give rise to a flood story that would be repeated in many of the region's traditions, including such things as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

in over 300 million years.

flooding may have taken place within the past 10k-12k years.

I haven't googled it, but the articles deal with various details of the basin's topology.

At one point Bob Ballard's crew thought they might have stumbled upon evidence of flooded habitation...I think that ended up as bunk.

there were probably A LOT of flood stories that were passed down...but the one in the Holy Babble just doesn't make sense- a ship larger than an aircraft carrier made out of wood- ain't gonna happen.

But if a catastrophic flood took place in this time frame the diplacement of many early agrarian communities whose members tried to save their animals as they raced for more than a month to keep ahead of a flood is imaginable.

That would very likely be a story told again and again among the descendants of the survivors, and its not much of a stretch to see how that story when repeated outside its origin could be mutated to become not a story of thousands of survivors but one tribe or one family of people blessed by divine intervention...

Of course, no evidence supports that...its all a figment of my willingness to believe its possibility.

So, there may be a basis in a large flood at some time in the past. Or, a large number of smaller floods that forced people to move on, perhaps taking their livestock on a barge.

My father and another man took a barge of cattle several hundred miles up the Athabasca River soon after immigrating to Canada in the 1930's (Peace River country of northern Alberta), so I know it can be done. If I was to turn this into a Bible story, however, I would be telling people that he moved the Bronx Zoo in a submarine across the Atlantic Ocean. I just mean stories get exagerated with the re-telling.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself...you know how Americans are.

Actually I get your point, and I think I'm talking about the same sort of development of a story.

As I say I haven't googled it but I think a geologic interpretation of evidence favoring the catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea basin is easily found.

I don't doubt or discount the possibility that great rivers have probably flooded in the middle east many times within the early history of civilization in the middle east and could also be the source of the story...its just that my imagined view of the sea roaring northward into the Black Sea is captivating.

We just lace on the skates, and away we go.

and causes its seasonal havoc.

Canadians are surely better people than those in Wisconsin as evidenced by the fact that you spend more days walking on water than we do.

I went down to Dallas, then up through the middle states that were affected by the big flood that year. I think a number of river systems were flooding that year - Grand Forks North Dakota was badly hit, and parts of it were evacuated. It was a pretty amazing thing to witness, not biblical, but still amazing.

not this?

chimp would be president for 8 years.

about page thirty-two Shirer makes an unsheduled stop at the ancient city of Ur (of the Chaldees.) He meets C.L.Woolley, dir. of the British Museum who is involved with a dig at the Royal Cemetery. Woolley tells Shirer that he believes he has uncovered evidence of the Great Flood. The flooding of the rather broad valley would, for the residents, tribes of the valley, have been the world. Funny that one never hears about this from the fundies.

I might have encountered it in the same course in which I read Gilgamesh...unfotunately information unused for so many years has unreliable recollections...

Any logical knowledge claims would be limited to saying, "There is, to date, absolutely no evidence that Noah's Arc is on Mt. Ararat."

He said it was a fact. He said he seen it with his own eyes. What about his logic?

Don

Eyewitness testiomony in trials for example. However, it is also fairly unreliable. Being mistaken or mis-perceiving is not the same as faulty logic.

...sentence someone to death in this country. Strange world we live in?

Don

They can tell if your burger has cheese or not.




Just a thought.

narrated. He had that weird radiant sincerity that made me just WANT to believe.

Think he spent a little bit too much time in the Van Allen radiation belt.

O8)

“Everything that we saw, all the samples that we gathered testify to the fact that there is no Noah’s Arc on Ararat’s western slope,” the news agency quoted Vadim Chernobrov, the center’s director, as saying.

He says all the evidence we gathered testify to the fact that there is no Noah's arc there. You could quibble about the word "fact", but otherwise he seems to be quite scrupulous about citing evidence, and making no claims other than what the evidence supports. It would have been better had he said "supports the hypothesis" rather than "testifies to the fact", but it is quite possible that the translation isn't that great.

The bible story sounds too impossible to believe anyway. There is no way someone could build a boat that could hold all of the species and feed them for what ever time it was supposed to be afloat. The amount of food that would have to be carried would take up more space than the creatures would let.

Of course maybe god brought them food everyday on a raft or something.

I was just pointing out that the Russian scientist was holding pretty closely to scientific standards of evidence. The literal story of Noah's Ark seems impossible on dozens of scientific grounds. Leaving aside the food and water needed, imagine the work of disposing of the tens of thousands of animals' wastes (you can't just let it pile up), work that has to be shared among less than a dozen or so people.

:crazy:

after all the ice and snow melts of the summit.

if they had reached the opposite conclusion, maybe all the fundies would leave Florida and head over to Russia.

Of course, Noah would never have left the ark with the Commies. Its probably in Utah.

onenote

Seriously, there is a cottage industry in Turkey selling "Ark remnants."

They find bits of wood and soak them in soy sauce to make them look 'authentic'...fundy tourists eagerly buy 'em.
:eyes:

that this holiest of relics will reassemble spontaneously through divine intervention, be commandeered by Randall Terry and swept into Florida on a holy tide to rescue Terri Schiavo and take her to the new Jerusalem.

Now I believe I'll have another beer.

million years old T. Rex bones......wait....wait.....

Thats right, we are all descendent's of Adam and Eve...wait...wait...

Don

the remains of Dorothy's hot-air balloon in Kansas.

You know when those oil drillers dug a hole in Siberia and heard the screams of the damned...:crazy:

What they were hearing were the anguished screams of Durango drivers when Peak-a-Boo Oil hits...

oh that's right the fundies don't believe science. satan must have made those godless russians say that.

The story was not meant to be taken literally.

The way that reads, you'd think the scientists "left a little something behind"...now I really know the meaning of a "cubit". :)

They'll have a conniption!

In the mid 1800s, archeologists dug up 12 tablets on the banks of the Tigris in modern day Iraq. They were written in cuneiform and made of clay. One is by Gilgamesh, a philosopher, who tells of Utnapishtim and his great flood experience. The tablets were written before 2,000 BCE when Mesopotamia was the most advanced civilization in that part of the world. Genesis was written about 1,000 years later.

Here’s a comparison of the legends:

GILGAMESH:
Utnapishtim is warned by his god, Ea: "Tear down your house and built a ship... Bring up the seed of all kinds of living things into the ship... Let its dimensions be well measured."

GENESIS (6:13)
And God said to Noah "Make yourself an ark... For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh...but...you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and you sons’ wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of each sort into the ark to keep them alive with you, they shall be male and female."

GILGAMESH:
Utnapishtim describes the ship he built: "The floor was 200 feet square. The walls were 200 feet high. I gave it six stories and divided the breadth seven times. Its interior I divided into nine. Six sar of bitumen (i.e. pitch) I poured into the kiln…

GENESIS (6:14)
God says to Noah, "Make room in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it; the length of the ark 300 cubits , its breadth 50 cubits and height 30 cubits (Approx 450’ L x 50’ W x 45’ H)..."

GILGAMESH
Utnapishtim describes how he loads his ship: “All that I had I loaded, of the seed of all living things. I brought into the ship my whole family and kinsfolk. The cattle of the field, the beasts of the field, all craftsmen...”

GENESIS
Noah loads his ship: “Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham, and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the wives of his sons entered the ark, followed by every beast...and all the cattle...and every creeping thing...and every bird... male and female of all flesh…”

GILGAMESH
Utnapishtim says: “Six days and six nights raged the wind, the flood, the cyclone devastated the land. When the seventh day came, the cyclone, the flood, the battle was over...the sea became calm and the cyclone died away, the flood ceased”

GENESIS
After seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth...on that day all the fountain of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened. And it rained forty days and forty nights.

GILGAMESH
Utnapishtim says: “I opened the window and light fell on my face. The ship lay upon Mount Nisir. Mount Nisir held the ship and allowed it not to move.”

GENESIS (8:4)
In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat.

GILGAMESH
Utnapishtim says:“When the seventh day arrived, I released a dove.”

GENESIS
At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, and sent forth a raven

For more see:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/G/Gilgames.asp