Yellowstone & Catastrophe (General)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Monday, December 22, 2014, 18:00 (3622 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: First of all, may I make a general plea? It's sometimes difficult enough to follow the different threads, and there is simply no way the weirdness of Yellowstone can come under horizontal gene transfer! If anyone wants to start a totally new discussion, would you please put it on a new thread.
> -I *did* say initially that I did not want to derail that thread, but continued at David's insistence. My apologies. I will make sure to start new threads regarding forked topics in the future.-
>DHW: On the subject of Yellowstone, with trees from Asia, there are many similar anomalies, such as fish fossils being found on the tops of mountains, and as I'm sure you know, one theory that explains them is catastrophism, i.e. a history of floods, volcanic eruptions, tectonic displacements, collisions with asteroids and comets etc. One of the theorists (Peter Warlow) even goes so far as to posit a “tippe top” overturning of the Earth, due to a mega-collision. He also posits reversals of the Earth's rotation. This would certainly solve some of the geological mysteries. Incidentally, Darwin was a uniformitarian, which goes hand in glove with his insistence that evolution must be a gradual process. My guess is that he was wrong on both counts.
> 
> Noah's Flood is one of countless flood myths. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (on which some scholars think the Noah story is based) the hero is Atrakasis. Of course there is no way the authors of these stories would know first-hand what had happened, let alone how widespread the floods were: a local catastrophe in those days would seem like the end of the world. I'd like to make two contrasting comments on this: 1) I have no doubt there were catastrophic floods in olden times, so it's scarcely surprising that stories should have been handed down; 2) Do those who believe that the story of Noah is the literal truth also believe that the story of Atrakasis is the literal truth? If not, why not?-
You are correct in that there is no way there would be any first hand accounts of a flood of biblical proportions except that of Noah and his family. However, if the biblical account is true, as I believe it is, then the very fact that there ARE catastrophic flood accounts that so closely mirror each other is actually evidence that it did in fact occur. The babel incident happened AFTER the flood. So, presuming that it is true, then when the languages were confused and people spread out over the earth, it only makes since that the cultural heritage would have traveled with them and would have been translated into their new language. That would explain why the accounts are so extraordinarily similar both in terms of time, scale, and details such as the big wooden ship with one man and his family.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.