Let’s suppose for a moment there’s a pissed off guy. He arms himself to the teeth. He starts killing. He kills men, women, children, pets…pretty much everything. For the sake of argument, we’ll say this fella does not get killed in the inevitable shootout with police. The question is: Do we let this guy go free, or do we sentence him to death or at least life in prison with no parole? Sentence him, you say?

Congratulations, you just condemned God.

Anyone who considers themselves a Christian is probably offended by this, thinking something like, “No, I would never condemn God!” Such folks would declare God is not a psycho madman, not at all like the fellow I described above. Perhaps they have forgotten the story of Noah and the Ark.

I bring this up because Noah is currently playing in theaters. I may go see it, I may not. I am familiar with the story, and it could be entertaining. I don’t believe the story, and there are a few reasons for this.

I am going to skip mostly past the scientific impossibility of the feat. God is a supernatural being, and it could be argued he used his amazing magical powers to turn the Ark into a TARDIS, bigger on the inside than on the outside. So two of every creature fit in comfortably and were magically maintained for the duration of the voyage.

The second problem with the story is the viability of this. When the voyage is over, all the animals are magically sent back to wherever they came from, where they presumably start mating like mad to repopulate the world. Except…two of a given species is not enough to restore it. Two of whatever animal mate, have kids, the kids have not choice but to mate with each other. While I am sure animals have incestuous relationships in the wild, incest is known to produce physically defective offspring. Sure, some will come out okay, but the long term prognosis is not good.

The first problem is the insanity of the scenario to begin with which I hinted at in my opening paragraph. The all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God decided mankind has gone bad because some of the population is not behaving the way he likes them to…so he decides to wipe all but one family out. And all the animals, save for an inadequate representation of each species. How does that seem rational to anyone? All of the plants would be gone, too. Being underwater for forty days is only gonna work out for aquatic creatures.

Somebody is gonna say, “But he’s God! He can preserve the plants and make sure the animals can repopulate with his magical omnipotence!” Or something to that effect. Great. Then why didn’t he use his omnipotence to wipe out the bad people with something less severe than a world-encompassing flood? Couldn’t he just whisper a little thought and have all the problem kids drop dead? Why go to the trouble of breaking numerous laws of physics, practicality and animal shit cleanup with a flood? Seriously, in this story he’s a baby-killer. And a kitten killer. And…well, you get the idea. Plenty of innocent lives lost in the flood.

The Ark story is, as one friend put it, the silliest story in the Bible. But people still buy into it, and I really don’t get that. It’s annoying enough when people ignore the evidence for evolution or global warming, both very much real, but to believe this ill-conceived fantasy story stretches the limits of my comprehension.

Anyway, that’s my take on the flood story. Yes, I bought into it once, when I was a kid, but now I know better.