Noah's Ark: Worst Story Ever?

Recently, we brought out a Noah's Ark toy for my 2-year-old daughter. She enjoyed putting the animals in the ark. My wife started telling her the story behind the toy. She tried her best, but she couldn't make it sound like a story based in sanity. It's just a terrible story from beginning to end.

Many stand-up comedians have already gone through the problems with this particular story. Eddie Izzard (and get ready for a butchering of his stellar material) pointed out that God thought the animals were evil too -- but the idea of an evil animal is just nonsensical. What is an evil giraffe, exactly?

And moreover, any evil ducks got off scot-free, no? They could just float on top of the water -- the only difference would be that the water is a little higher than usual. The world should now be full of evil ducks.

Eddie Izzard also pointed out that this was basically the Etch-Sketch version of creation. God didn't like  what he had made, so he decided to just shake the Etch-a-Sketch and come up with a new reality.

Joe Rogan asserted that no one, not even the developmentally disabled (not his choice of words), could possibly think that this story was plausible. Eugene Mirman brought up that this is an incredibly bizarre solution, on God's part, for the problem of sin: Let's just flood everything! That's the only solution I could see!

David Cross said that, after Noah survives, what happens? Noah's family is the only one that survives. So that means lots of incest.

Here's the larger point: What possible good, useful lesson could my lovely little daughter learn from the Noah's Ark story? None, from what I can tell. Meanwhile, here are the horrible lessons she could learn:

• God, who controls everything, will slaughter everyone at the drop of a hat if they don't comply with whatever his demands are (which are never made entirely clear in this particular story).
• If you are told by a mysterious voice to do something bizarre, like building an ark, do it, or your family, and everyone you love, will drown and die.
• You can bring animals with you in the crazy death ark, but only two of each, because then those two can have children, who will then presumably have sex with each other despite all the mutations that will follow, and then, even with that incredibly shallow gene pool, presumably species will thrive somehow?

Seriously, is there a message at all in this story, besides trying to indoctrinate blind obeisance to whatever bizarre, fickle, and unnecessarily cruel demands this "God" person comes up with? Maybe this story was helpful in the days when people needed reinforcement to trust God no matter what impossible odds they seemed to face. Now that fate is less fickle (and we know a little more about genetics), I don't see the Noah's Ark story doing anything but scarring little children.

Many secular humanist, agnostic, "spiritual but not religious," "I don't know, leave me alone" types like myself patronize the Bible by saying "it's an amazing piece of literature." Really, though? Is the Noah's Ark story even that? You don't get to know Noah, or what could possibly drive him to do these things. He's just some guy, who is deemed good for some reason, and does what God tells him to. You definitely don't get to understand his family, who are at best mentioned in passing, as if they are mere trivia. And you definitely definitely definitely times infinity don't get to understand a God who commits such bizarrely, devastatingly cruel acts upon the creation he allegedly loves. None of it makes any emotional sense, let alone narrative sense.

I grew up going to Sunday School every week, so I understand the pull this story had on our young psyches, what with the cute animals marching two by two and such. But putting aside that rather primitive nostalgia, I don't see a good reason for continuing to tell this story. It should really be edited out of the Bible entirely.

I think this story, and others like it, do nothing but prevent the Bible's good messages from getting across. I'm not religious any more (in part because of horrible stories like that of Noah), but I think Jesus's message of love, forgiveness and understanding is absolutely terrific. It deserves a better lead-in than the one in which millions get slaughtered for no good reason, all to set the stage for rampant incest.

Granted, there is more in the Old Testament, some of it good (some of the Ten Commandments make sense), but most of it terrible. It's pretty much always emotional blackmail. Here's how most Old Testament stories go: Terrible things happen. People decide it's because they didn't pay enough attention to God -- basically, that they didn't sufficiently kiss his ass. Like a petulant little baby, He lashed out by killing a bunch of them. So they go back to making sacrifices. After that, things get better. Moral of the story: Love God, or else. This is a similar moral to every story that every abusive lover has ever told his object of abuse.

But, to be fair, this is how all gods worked at the time. The Greek and Roman gods were no different. They didn't have any moral lessons to impart. They were just super-powerful versions of humans who could do whatever the hell they wanted, and if you didn't kiss their asses, you're dead. It was a harsh life then, one of fear at the mercy of forces you didn't understand, and your only way to alleviate some anxiety and retain some sense of control was to get on the right side of whatever god you believed might be in charge.

The Abrahamic God was just one of many options at the time, and didn't really distinguish himself among the rest in any substantial way. He always had a few diehards (and who doesn't?), but all He could do to ever gain some real traction is to say "Hey, remember that famine or when the Babylonians killed everyone or whatever? That was because you didn't love me enough. So now it's payback time. Let's see some dead goats already."

And in those days, people always lived on the precipice of death, with almost no knowledge of why, so they were more than willing to grab onto whatever seemed to work at any particular time. If sacrifices to God were followed by a good harvest, or a military victory, or what have you, then they would believe in God for a while (correlation, in their minds, being the same as causation).

But then the Babylonians would invade or the plague would return, despite the fact that the Jews had killed animals and prayed and jumped up and down and etc. So then they would say "OK, this ain't working." They then turned to Baal or Zoroaster or Odin or David Cassidy or whoever else some convincing orator would could come up with. And the cycle continues.

In the Bible, Jesus breaks through this repetitive, tedious narrative with something revolutionary. It's no wonder that Jesus was the one who really made this a world religion. Compassion, patience, love and hope will always win more followers than threats and bribes. Instead of just a temporary correlation that might or might not be connected to positive outcomes, Jesus had a new philosophy that could result in happiness no matter which direction the wind blew. It was revolutionary enough to create a whole new world -- one that almost never lives up to his standards, but one that at least tries to.

Anyway, yeah. I'm a true-blue atheist at this point, but I of course want my daughter to grow up with a strong moral core. And I'd love it if she could be raised in a tradition that teaches the lessons of Jesus Christ. But not God. That guy's a jerk.