344
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
344 points (97.0% liked)
Atheist Memes
7349 readers
462 users here now
About
A community for the most based memes from atheists, agnostics, antitheists, and skeptics.
Rules
-
No Pro-Religious or Anti-Atheist Content.
-
No Unrelated Content. All posts must be memes related to the topic of atheism and/or religion.
-
No bigotry.
-
Attack ideas not people.
-
Spammers and trolls will be instantly banned no exceptions.
-
No False Reporting
-
NSFW posts must be marked as such.
Resources
International Suicide Hotlines
Non Religious Organizations
Freedom From Religion Foundation
Ex-theist Communities
Other Similar Communities
!religiouscringe@midwest.social
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
A large part of the Biblical version is a copy-paste of the Sumerian myth (like a lot of the mythological parts of the Bible), which was only centered on the area of the city of Shuruppak. And we know that there were a few big events of the Euphrates flooding severely (Mesopotamian floods are a lot more destructive and unpredictable than the Niles), and one flood event in particular, dated around 2900 BCE, largely destroyed Shuruppak and a couple other cities in the area (they got better).
The Black Sea deluge hypothesis is popular but that rise was spread over a few thousand years, there was no sudden flood, no one was surprised.
There have been several mega-floods throughout history that wiped out regions basically as big as human civilizations traded at the time. They were caused by various fallout from the ice age ending. Even some in North America. These are MASSIVE, once every ice age types of events. Humans didn't manage to keep much between ice ages, and that's if you take the evidence that humans have even existed as homo sapiens that long.
One example is the Bonneville floods. Thousands of years of erosion in days' time. There is evidence for another similar event up by Washington. That's just two, in close proximity geographically. There is similar evidence over in that region of biblically sized floods. Floods that would put any weather related floods to shame by several orders of magnitude.
It's probably just a corrupted story of one of those events, corrupted into that one story of a rancher basically doing exactly the story of Noah (minus all the preaching and grand-standing) for his ranch, for one of those smaller once a thousand years type floods.
If there's one thing we know it's not, it's those kinds of floods, because those you talk about come from Ice Age and giant glaciers sliding or breaking down giant lakes. There was none of those in the Middle East when humans existed, not in Mesopotamia which is a giant flat plain, and that's where those stories came. We know the biblical account is a copy of the Sumerian account, and we know what event the Sumerian account comes from. It's not an Ice Age story, and it doesn't come from an earlier, older memory from WAY further North. The closest event to that is indeed the Black Sea expansion that happened at the end of that period, and we know that one took a few thousand years.
lol no. There were several megafloods in the middle east. Your ignorance is proof of nothing.
I bet the people that wrote the Bible had no knowledge of those events.
The period of the Babylonian captivity, when they were brought to Babylon as prisoners and stayed several decades through the 6th c. BCE before being freed by Cyrus II, is likely a point where they brought a lot of Babylonian culture back to Jerusalem. Plus, the god of the Bible comes from two origins, Yahweh and El, the latter being a storm god that had a lot of cultural osmosis in the entire second millennium BCE, being associated with Enlil and Baal, through whom the Sumerian and Akkadian stories did get around. So there's definitely a part where some of those stories made their way into Canaanite culture by themselves, then the Hebrews and Jews, naturally over several centuries to become their own ancestral culture, and a part where the Jews brought back and adopted Babylonian stories when they returned from the exile. We can tell because of the narrative / writing style and the variations that we can find, we can date when some of those stories appeared.
In the case of the Flood story, the text has too many similarities, identical lines, to not be straight up copy-pasted from Babylonian texts after the exile - but even then, there's a couple variations of the Biblical story that does suggest they already had a memory of that story in their own culture (40 days or 7 days, that sort of details). It's fairly likely that they simply considered that those stories were about the same god as their El, in the same way the Greeks would go "oh, you have a god of thunder too? I bet his name is Zeus. I like your story about Zeus." And really, they're not wrong, since they do have the same origin, they are in fact the same god, branching into many cultures across Mesopotamia over a couple millennia.
So no, they definitely didn't know anything about the actual event that inspired the deluge story (you can tell by how it's all an abstract threat to them, because the Jordan river doesn't flood anything like the Euphrates, compared to the real threat and pain of exile), but they knew about the story of the deluge.
Thanks very informative. I still believe you can analyze this shit to hell, and all you end up with is no actual knowledge of what the fuck is true or false. They are basing it on stories passed down through generations without knowing if they are true or merely allegories. When they turn out to be actually true, it is more coincidence than anything else.
That's why I don't really care if there was some event that was the basis for the stories in the Bible, because it'¨s irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the superstition surrounding it, not the truth of it.