A new perspective.

I'm not entirely sure this thread should be in 2012, or general predictions. Though I am not going to consider this a prediction at all, merely speculation on thoughts.

In my daily pondering of things typically discussed on here, an idea clicked in my head, and I will present it here as best I can so that it makes sense to all of you.

I consider myself a religious individual with moderate faith. So some of these ideas are assuming parts of the bible are indeed true. However, they are still only speculation, as I believe no human written book, be it the word of God or not, to be flawless and true.

With that being said, here we go.

Supposedly long ago, people lived much longer. Hundreds of years even. After the 'Great Flood' often referred to as Noah's Flood, the lifespan of the average person dropped significantly. Now, the bible would have you believe that God altered the food, people, and earth, to no longer support such longevity (Link below). Fair enough. Let's take it from a more scientific approach shall we?

Biblestudy.org - Post Flood

Consider what it would take to make a flood of global proportions, that cultures around the world are reportedly known for citing in their own histories.

Link:
Science - How Stuff Works - Great Flood

One would assume that it couldn't be a run of the mill tsunami, as something much larger than a chunk of land would have to fall into the ocean to swamp most of the earth. Perhaps the earth has had previous glacier melts that flooded the planet... but would those subside as quickly as this 'Great Flood' did? So, perhaps there could have been some sort of geomagnetic disturbance, shifting the earth around (pole shift?) and temporarily flooding, moving, sinking land? I can only speculate on that, as I'm no expert...

If this were true however, would it also be reasonable to assume that perhaps in this geomagnetic fluctuation there may have been an excess of solar radiation reaching earth's surface? Perhaps permanant damage was done to our DNA, forever shortening our lifespan? Hard to say with no proof, but perhaps plausible.

Finally, and probably the most interesting part to me, is that even if one of these two scenarios that I've mentioned were true, both would not spell out a bright future for us. If the scientific approach were true, then while we could survive another flood quite easily, would we survive the second round of DNA punishment? If the biblical side is true, then with God's promise to never flood the earth again, will the next round be fire? Solar flare?

Please do not turn this into a prophecy type thread, these are merely my personal musings, and I bring them here for some light scientific discussion. I do not Believe specifically that either of these events will happen again in the near or distant future, but simply would like to discuss the probability of truth to each idea.

Thanks!

** Again, sorry if this should be in some other forum.


[edit on 28-12-2009 by Demonis]

well for a start it would not be very practical for people to live longer lives than we do now . if you consider the planets population , how would we feed everyone ,where would everyone live. children would still be born adding to the numbers it would be chaos.
and that is one of the reasons why wars and disease are in fact necessary.
we are at the top of the food chain with nothing other than ourselves and diseases to cull the population.
as harsh as it sounds , it is a fact of life

While that may be true, one could also assume that with longer lifespans, the likelihood of higher intelligence would also follow, thus bringing better technology for agriculture, as well as potential settlement of other planets for the population to grow. We live our lives in a hurry, if there were no hurry, perhaps things would be better.

Take the average American for instance... most of us seem to believe that we should follow this set pattern:

Growth/Education - Birth - ~18 Years of age
Further Education/Work - ~24 Years of age
Marry/Begin Family - ~25-35 Years of age
and everything after that is financial planning for retirement and college funding for roughly the next 30 years. Where you're lucky to live past 70.

If we could live to be even 200 years old, I certainly wouldn't consider having children until my 50s or 60s. Certainly wouldn't want more than two. But that's just me.

I always thought that it would be very easy for God to just change the genetics of that small group of people, so that for instance, there are fewer telomeres. I'm sure there's more involved in determining longevity, but manipulation of dna would seem trivial to someone who invented you.

As for the flood, well, the chinese claim to be able to manipulate weather, so I don't see why God just couldn't make it rain and rain, while throwing a tsunami causing earthquake or two in there.

Most Bible scholars believe that he ages of Noah and other biblical figures were exagerated upon because in those times a long life was equated with prosperity and virtue.

The Jewish Historian Josephus wrote:

"God afforded them a longer time of life on account of their virtue, and the good use they made of it in astronomical and geometrical discoveries, which would not have afforded the time of foretelling [the periods of the stars] unless they had lived six hundred years; for the great year is completed in that interval."

On the other hand, I've seen theories that relate a different explanation. Some think that natural factors which had changed after the flood contributed to shorter and shorter life spans.

Here's a link to an interesting article on the topic:

Why did people live longer before the great flood?

Personally... I think it's possible but not probable that people lived for many hundreds of years, or in Noah's case, almost a thousand years. In fact, I think that quite the opposite is true; people's life spans are ever increasing today whereas the average lifespan in the time of Noah was probably about 30 - 40 years at best.

Honestly though, I'm open minded about such things.

You linked the same page as me!

Originally posted by Demonis
You linked the same page as me!

That's 'cause I'm a dork... hehe... sorry about that.

When I was a child, in Hebrew school, they taught us that the ancient Hebrews did not count the years the same way as we do, thus accounting for the vast ages of those in the Bible. I am not aware of any scholarly work on this issue, but a different way of counting years and time would account for the seeming discrepancy. However, from a mathematical perspective, for someone to live over 900 "years," months would have to be counted as years!

Originally posted by Berens
When I was a child, in Hebrew school, they taught us that the ancient Hebrews did not count the years the same way as we do, thus accounting for the vast ages of those in the Bible. I am not aware of any scholarly work on this issue, but a different way of counting years and time would account for the seeming discrepancy. However, from a mathematical perspective, for someone to live over 900 "years," months would have to be counted as years!

Excellent point. It's my understanding that prophecy contained in the Torah was coded with regards to time. 1 day in prophetic time can equal 1 year or even a thousand years. The prohecies relating to the Nation of Israel are an excellent example of "time coding".

I've always thought that the Torah was not just text, but layer upon layer of complex coding. We see this in the Bible code phenomena and in relation to concepts which were previously interpreted one way but then re-interpreted based upon new information.

I remember reading that the Torah was thought to originate as a jumble of incoherant letters... more precisely... the Torah contained an infinite amount of possible meanings.

[edit on 28-12-2009 by Anamnesis]

I had read somewhere (its been a while) that the bible or 'word of God' was to be interpreted exactly as such, ONE word. This somehow related to the bible code and other such theories, but one would assume it could only apply to the earliest forms of such a text. Today's holy books are but a shell of what once was.