by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: November 21, 2009

I don't really know why I do it, but every time I see a headline that proclaims some new "scientific proof" that "The Great Flood Really Happened" or that "Noah's Ark Has Been Found," I always pause to read at least the first paragraph. Maybe it's because I'm hoping that it's all true, and that the question has finally been settled once and for all. Unfortunately, I never get beyond that first paragraph because I always find out that it's just someone out to prove that PT Barnum was indeed right by unloading another truckload of medieval pseudo-science onto an always-ready audience.

Let's be reasonable about this. Do you honestly think that if such "proof" existed that it has managed to avoid discovery for six thousand years? Or that "cavemen" spoke the Queen's English and rode around on dinosaurs, just like good old Alley-Oop?

To all those insisting that their version of the Biblical "truth" about floods and the Mother of All Bass Boats has been "proven" by something that they recently read in a widely-respected scholarly journal such as the National Enquirer, I ask that you please pause for a moment to consider a simple question: Where have the oldest civilizations to have developed in antiquity been found?

That is correct: all the great ancient civilizations developed in river valleys. Egypt? Nile River Valley! Sumeria and "Ur of the Chaldees?" Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys! Harrappa and Mohenjo-daro? Indus River Valley! China? Yellow River Valley!

And what is eventually going to happen if you, or anyone else, live in a river valley for a long-enough period of time?

You are right once again! It's going to flood! F-L-O-O-D! The floods might have happened at different times but, in the years before writing was invented, oral histories had an annoying tendency to get a little blurry about specific dates. You have a flood in your river valley, and the guy from the other side of the mountain had a flood in his river valley. It seems logical that both of you would think that it was the same flood.

Personally, I think that everyone is entitled to believe in anything they want if it gives them that comfortable sense of intellectual security that we all need every now and then. For some, it comes from knowing that everyone else in the free world is too stupid to recognize the obvious truth: that the Space Aliens, the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Central Intelligence Agency, or the (Fill in the Blank) are the ones that are really running the show!

And I have the right to believe that you are wrong to the point of silliness, and that I also have a moral obligation to fight you tooth and nail to prevent you from using our schools to drag the rest of us back into the Dark Ages.

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