Noah’s Flood: Different Locations With Different Stories

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I am writing in response to your article on Noah’s Ark ("Was There Really a Great Flood?", Aug. 2, 2009), this seems a teensy-weensy bit disingenuous. It's worded as if the writer were giving two sides of a controversial scientific theory. But it's really just giving the Judeo-Christian story of the flood, admitting in the middle that there's no scientific evidence for it, then overriding that with more pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to support the same Judeo-Christian story.

Well, other cultures have flood stories, but they're quite different if we'd look at them. We didn't do that here. Utnapishtim may be a cultural ancestor of Noah. He isn't all that different.

However, the Chinese flood story doesn't put anybody on Mount Ararat; neither does the Easter Island story; neither does the Norse story; neither does the Greek story; neither does the Mongol story. In fact, neither does Utnapishtim's story. To tell the truth, the very word "Ararat" is a misunderstanding of Urartu. So there you go.

Diana Gainer
Greenville, Texas, USA