If supervolcano eruption, global ice age, meteor strike ends humankind would be fulfilled bible prophecy 'end of sin, suffering and death'?

End of sin, suffering and death when we are all dead. Sounds nice I guess. This post was edited by Kittigate at February 13, 2017 7:39 AM MST

Why do we need a horse?

Clever! :D

Handy that, literal belief. Means you don't have to think about the nature of the Bible itself.

  The notion of a flood of sufficient depth to drown everything world-wide in a Divine version of that daft Waterworld film (I did like its opening graphic though... :-) ), is of course absurd. There is just not enough water on the planet. However the Noah story is not even original to the OT. Its origins are obscure to say the least but seems to have its own ancestors in older myths in the same region of the Middle East. Don't forget those peoples knew little or nothing of the world beyond the Mediterranean shores, as few if any travelled far.

You cannot take the superstitions of a Bronze Age tribal society in one small region as statements of truth. The Bible, like the Koran, Talmud and other faith's scriptures, is simply an expression of its authors beliefs, not a scientific treatise of contemporary, let alone future, geographical and social events. It does mention earthquakes, but only because the Mediterranean region is tectonically active, but the people living there 2000 - 3000 years ago had no idea how earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen. We are lucky: we know they are the results of the planet's inner workings, but such knowledge is historically extremely recent. Had the Hebrews lived somewhere geologically quiescent, perhaps the middle of Africa, Eastern Europe or Northern Russia, they'd have experienced no earthquakes so could not feared them.

It is possible the Flood story originated in a folk memory of an area of land sinking, I suppose, but even that is a bit far-fetched though parts of the Mediterranean shore line have risen or sunk over historical time, relatively to the surrounding land.  I think I've seen it postulated that the story is old enough to have reflected sea-level rise at the end of the last glaciation, "filling" the Mediterranean and inundating low-lying shore-land, but this has two serious flaws. Firstly, most of the Mediterranean is yery deep and existed long before Man's arrival, though under low sea-level if the Straits of Gibraltar are shallow enough, the Sea might have been a river lake fed by the Nile, Rhone, Danube etc, and overflowing through the Straits but at a lower water-level (just as the English Channel was a river valley).   Secondly, I find it hard to believe a folk memory could have survived from over perhaps 8000 years ago, as it would have to have done!

More likely the Flood myth came from some freak weather event, but where? My money would be on the marshes around the Tigris / Euphrates basin, flooding exceptionally and driving everyone away for long enough for the story to become told, re-told, re-told, altered and embellished each telling. A disaster locally, but hardly Kevin Costner Meets Noah! Certainly not to be taken literally, and certainly no portent for Mankind.

A light-hearted post-script to the Noah tale. There is a pub in the village of Wraysbury, near London, called 'The Perseverance'. Its sign is a lovely painting of a snail in the foreground, crawling away form the viewer as it makes its patient way to the Ark away in the distance!

It might interest you to know that there were eye witnesses to most things in the bible. They recorded their observations as best they could, carving some records into stones and passing verbal accounts from one generation to the next. It has taken a very long time to interpret these records because they don't describe anything we have seen. For example the legend of the dragon is carved into rocks all over the world, but it is only recently that anybody has noticed a natural effect that fits that description. This is a long book because it tries to cover everything completely.
 http://saturniancosmology.org/

Another interesting point is that there is that specially trained smart people have searched hard for evidence of a worldwide flood. They found two. Neither of them was Noah's flood of 2359 BC. Nevertheless, tribes all over the world recorded a flood that year, and they all agreed on all the details. The start of that flood is still commemorated by our holiday of Halloween/Day Of The Dead. So maybe there is more to this subject than your logic can cope with.

I suspect if you look you will find ancient stories of severe floods everywhere anyway, but Hallowe'en was originally an English church tradition called All Souls' Eve. commemorating the dead, but perhaps based on earlier traditions. What we see of it now is a version converted to suit American commerce in recent history, and it had NOTHING to do with Waterworld-style floods! Plagues perhaps, purely local floods perhaps, in some places, but nothing like that in the Bible myth. 

As for your rather rude remark about my inability to cope with logic, I don't believe in gods but am interested in old beliefs, so prefer not to take the myths at face value, but to try to understand their real origins and themes, as far as genuine archaeology, meteorology and geology can help us do so.  

The Flood myth cannot possibly be given an accurate date - I don't remember seeing actual year-numbers anywhere in the Bible, so I don't know whom you are quoting, nor how they managed to calculate it so finely from no genuine evidence. A figure that "definite" is immediately non-credible simply because it is too specific. Even radio-carbon dating has at best a tolerance of some decades, usually some centuries. Whatever actually happened there are no proper records, just folk-tales of unknown origin, eventually set down in ancient tribal scribings later swept up into an anthology whose use of "Holy" in its title neither infers or confers any attempt to determine historical accuracy. The so-called "Holy" Bible is only a set of ancient folk-lore and statements of those folk's religious beliefs - no more than that.

I do know people have tried to find evidence for the Bible tale, but the best they have done is say, yes, many ancient tribes suffered floods rare enough and catastrophic enough for them alone to think the world was ending, and given their genuinely limited world knowledge and their beliefs, the victims cannot be blamed for blaming their own gods for it. Besides, floods are fairly common, but rarely, one occurs somewhere of greater than normal magnitude for its own region, so the exceptions tended to become somehow special for those ancient societies.

There is no corroboration between stories from people who lived continents apart, just similarity. A natural disaster is just that, and even if you don't understand its real cause so blame it on some deity your ancestors invented for just such things, you can still understand the devastation and death-toll.

You say the researchers were "specially trained" - but in what? Certainly not real science because you hint they made a conclusion based on just 2 sites. That's not even a hypothesis. Perhaps they fell into the trap of finding what they wanted to find, rather than real answers that might just as easily have proven their ideas unanswerable or plain wrong. This is how science works _ it asks, tests, reviews, tests again, invites others to replicate the experiment or look for themselves, and rejects the hypothesis that is shown to fail. If their two finds were real traces of a world-wide event, it would have left corroborative traces elsewhere, but you say they found none despite careful searching, and that nor has anyone else.

Actually there are geological evidences for genuine world-wide inundations by high sea-level, but far, far before the dawn of humans recording their own history in any formal sense. The last really high one spanned a time calculated from many, many sites and many, many studies by genuinely "smart" people, around the world, as well 65 MILLION years ago - and even then only covered a fraction of the land surface. This was the period that gave us the Chalk, laid down in warm tropical seas. And it was well over 64M years before Man even existed. The last warm phase of the Ice Age raised the sea by only about 10 metres, as I remember from genuine texts by genuine scientists - who calculated these phases to last s few hundred thousand years each, so it was within human existence but long before Biblical or even Sumerian times.

We have to remember that what can be devastating regionally for humans may be a minor event for the planet; what is a long time for humans is nothing in the Earth's time-scales; and that Mankind has only started to record and understand the natural world properly within the last 2 or 3 centuries.. Prior to that reigned only genuine ignorance, and the cultural dead-ends of religious absolutism and aimless superstition. We have progressed beyond them, no longer believing Adam and Eve's literal existence, the Phlogiston Theory and Bishop Ussher's well-meant but ultimately absurd Biblical arithmetic.