The Epic of Gilgamesh and the flood story of Noah, both have their similarities and their differences. In both stories a great flood takes place, you could call it God’s or the gods’ great purge. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the gods wanted to wipe out mankind because they were too noisy and the gods were not able to sleep. I then thought to myself that this wasn’t a good enough reason to kill off mankind. If they were all powerful gods couldn’t they have somehow blocked out all the sounds of mankind or even send some kind of warning to the people?
Mankind became fearful of God and challenged His almighty authority by creating a tower believed by many to reach Heaven. In doing so, God (a jealous God) became infuriated at His creation and smote the Mesopotamians by altering the transparency of one language into multiple tongues. This generated much fear, confusion, and chaos amongst the people and definitively thwarted the construction of the tower. The Confusion of Tongues Excessive arrogance and pride is undoubtedly a weakness because it severs logic and reason from the human intellect, thus facilitating ignorance. Reasonably, the tower could not reach the ‘heavens’ because we are told heaven is a theological/spiritual realm that exists in a metaphysical parallel dimension, and not part of the physical world.
“God must be Evil” The question “is God evil?” is asked very often with both sides of the question offering different answers to this question with no definitive answer coming about but in both cases people coming out with very convincing arguments for both sides of the story. Some people argue that God is indeed evil because he is omniscient and because of his omniscience he knows that from the moment he decided to create us maybe even before then he knew which of us would reject him thus securing a place in hell for them or would sin again securing them a place in hell and yet does nothing about this. This is a major contradiction to his supposedly being omnibenevolent and some people even go so far as to use examples of murder and rape which are horrific events which they then use to say “how can a loving God allow such a thing to happen?” They then go further into it saying how as God is omnipresent and can see everything that has happened, will happen and is happening he must take some sort of sick pleasure in watching these events occur and so is evil. Or at the very least by allowing such a horrific event to happen without some form of justice or stopping them then he has to be evil as only an evil person would let evil acts go unpunished. Sam Harris uses this idea in one of his quotes saying that “Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes or he doesn’t care to or he doesn’t exist.
“Genocide is the ultimate essentializing of the exotic. It defines a type and assigns it a character, projecting what is inwardly hated or feared onto this fetish” (Goodman, 2010). It is wrong to single out a group of people because of their religion, race, or beliefs. I do not believe that people should die because another race thinks they are better than them. I find that to be one of the most ridiculous things in the world.
Nobody was listening to each other and there was no order in what was happening. Yeats goes on to explain how ‘anarchy is loosed upon the world’, implying that before WW1 the world was peaceful but suddenly it has been ruined. He also talks about ‘blood-dimmed tide’ being loosed, which shows the gory side to the war and just how dangerous it was. ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’ also connotes a more powerful image of the war. It is suggesting that many innocent people have been killed and as a result, even more innocent people have been hurt or corrupted.
Although there are differences in the reasons for these floods, there are also numerous similarities between these stories. Could it be possible that these stories are similar because they are all adapted from a single ancient oral tradition? The oldest flood story is the story of Atrahasis, which is an Old Babylonian origins. Atrahasis was an allegedly historical king of Shurrupak, in Mesopotamia around 1700 BCE. Atrahasis is also known as Ziusudra, and is the Ut-napishtim of the Gilgamesh epic.
Why than did God create the world only to destroy it. Also, was everyone on the earth and every animal so evil that they deserve to be slaughtered by the hand of God? In the story of Cain and Able, God gives no reason for rejecting Cain’s gift. Why would God reject Cain’s gift if God knew that it would lead to so much anger that Cain would kill Able? Some would say that God was testing Able.
He was concerned that it could inflict lots of harm at great ease, an idea that was reinforced by the atrocities of World War 1 which created destruction that many people had never seen before. Yeats describes, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’, this conveys a universal idea that not only applies to his time but throughout history. The best of people, the intellectuals, do not act upon their beliefs because they ‘lack conviction’ and
Further, the more one has sinned, the greater one will suffer. Based upon these premises Job was suffering tremendously because he was guilty of grievous sins. In response to Job’s questioning about why God has allowed this to happen to him Eliphaz asks a rhetorical question, "Can mortals be righteous before God? Can a human beings be pure before their Maker?" (Job 4:17).
Never will it be to the extent of our world being flooded excessively or our world exploded in flames like shown in the film. Anything we do as a human race will affect the earth without doubt but the statements made by Gore are ludicrous and even some may see as ignorant. I do have a personal responsibility as does any human to treat the earth in a proper way and try and not use more than I need. But going out of my way to spend extra money on lightbulbs that don’t do anything but make a room darker is ridiculous If we should be pointing fingers at anyone it should be the idiots who decided to build two giant water cooling stations near the bridge in Fall River or the people who take hour long showers. Most humans aren’t that wasteful and are actually decent at reusing items but there are many people who could do a little better.