AboutJoyce D Expertise Religious Educator (former director for six years, lifelong Unitarian Universalist - "UU"). I`m familiar with UU history & resources on the internet. I belong to many UU forums, have attended many congregations, and have been a delegate at the UU General Assembly.
Question Thank you for taking my question...I am 75 years old and by definition I would consider myself an Agnostic because I do not believe God had anything to do with writing the bible nor do I believe everything in it..but I would appreciate your opinion and please do not quote the bible but tell me in your own words..my question pertains to Noah"s flood..now as I understand it the bible events that took place in the Mid East around the Mediterranean Sea...When God told Noah he was going to kill all the ppl on earth except Noah and his family why did he include the Asian culture the Euopeans and North America etc etc when they where never mentioned in the bible..in other words why did he kill so many innocent ppl..Thank You George Pope ..Illinois
Answer George Pope,
I am not a Bible expert. There are others on Allexperts who say they are Bible Experts. You have sent this request to an "expert" in Unitarian Universalism (UUism). Our religion has no official stance on the Bible, though we tend to believe it as metaphor and not as fact or "the word of God."
I am also an Agnostic. Agnostics believe that we cannot know. How can we know if God exists? How can we know if God, for which we have no agreed-upon definition except maybe "Creator", wrote the Bible? If the Creator did write the Bible, then why didn't he write it so that it would be clear to everyone what was meant by it? Why has it been the cause of so much disagreement and created several different religions that interpret it differently? If the Creator did not write the Bible, then how is it "the truth"? Are there "truths" in it? I think there must be, because why would people use it for so many years if some things in it didn't ring true for them?
Even in the Bible, Jesus is said to have used stories - parables - that he did not claim were "true" - to tell how he thought people should behave.
Archeologists have many reasons to believe that there never was a great flood that covered the entire earth as was the Noah's Ark story.
Here are some links to pages that dispute this story. (This site doesn't make links clickable, so you'll need to have this message sent to you via email & hopefully your email software will make them clickable or you'll have to copy and paste them into another browser window.):
