Yes and Noah

"It took 2000 years to find Noah's ark" said Bill Hemmer, Fox News' answer to Barbie's plastic pal Ken ( only dumber.)  Of course it's never been found, although no end of  Believers have assured me it has, but "Bible Bashing" archaeologists, geologists and historians don't want us to know.   I don't know whether Hemmer thinks it was found some millennia ago or whether the mythical world flood occurred back during the Roman Empire, but it doesn't matter since it never happened at all.

Of course writers from St Augustine to Andrew Snelling of Creation Ministries International, good Christians all, have warned believers to please check the facts before erupting in rapturous affirmation of  embarrassingly erroneous faith, but experience has been otherwise and embarrassment is rare amongst prophets and prognosticators of the believing kind.   To America's Christian Right, it's all true even when it contains contradictory claims -- and it does. 

Actually there are two interleaved Biblical versions of the story of Noah, with different names for God and different numbers of animals and different numbers of days it rained. Of course there are very similar flood accounts from other cultures in the region, with different angry gods and different ark builders and different outcomes reflecting the respective religious beliefs and different morals to the story, but we won't get into Utnapishtim and Ziusudra or  Gilgamesh and Enkidu.  This would turn into a long book in short order.

Suffice it to say that there is no geological evidence, there is not enough water anywhere to flood the earth that deep.  Suffice it to say that there are far, far too many species "clean" and "unclean"  to have fit on any boat, whether two by two or six by six, nor is there any way that they would somehow have been dropped off in their respective and far flung habitats.  Is there any reason to ask why the salt water fish didn't die from the fresh water or the fresh water fish didn't die from the salt?  No, because no matter how much you yell and scram, rage and shout, your belief is entirely, wholly and completely ridiculous and you know it.  It's absurd both from the claim of worldwide "wickedness" to
 the mechanics of flooding to a depth of  30,000 ft without leaving a trace.  Believing in the literal although contradictory truth of the Genesis stories fits every description of insanity I can think of.

So you'd naturally assume that the righteously ridiculous religious Right would be very dissatisfied with  "Noah," Darren Aronofsky's $130-million blend of both El and YHWH versions of  the Hebrew flood myth.  Like the truth itself, it's not "Biblically faithful," no matter how faithful it is to what the Bible says.  You can't please everyone -- not the Evangelicals and certainly not God, whether he's the Elohim or YHWH, or Allah, or the entire Babylonian pantheon even though he feels bad afterward and promises never to do it again if we'll only give him another chance. It's not just the Christian Taliban issuing proclamations and fatwahs, of course.  NOAH has been banned in Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and condemned elsewhere in the Muslim world. What else can you expect in  a world where organizations think they own a copyright on lies and can't abide anyone else telling them.