I was "WOW" when told the flood story to my still wiring-up pre-adolescent mind. The image of an entire planet getting rained on was an impressively scary image... and fun as I look out the window at the torrential monsoon outside.
The innocent little science geek in me (yes, my path was cast more less by then) asked, "But then where did all the water go afterwards?"
It was met with silence and in retrospect of what must be an effort at a most re-assuring smile (if the memory in my by now fusing cranial bones has not failed me ) "Well, they dry up/ evaporate... you know? eer..become clouds?"Yea, yea but that somehow produced a weird feeling in a kid's mind that the adult saying those words wasn't very sure or convinced herself. In my 10 yr old world , adults are supposed to know everything. Right! Hmmm.....
Accepting it in my young mind then and figured it just became those clouds in the sky and maybe part of it just got siphoned off into space or disappeared into the earth core somehow, I didn't pursue the subject further. Ok cut me some slack.. I was frigging ten and reading up on Bermudas Triangle, volcanoes and the Great Pyramids when someone came and tell me about me this Flood story. So yes-- water could just as well have evaporated into the big black universe out there in my 10 year old mind...
Some years later...sitting smug, rocking two hind legs of a chair against the back wall of the classroom, I was reminded of this episode in yet another telling of the same story. Only this time it was steeped in some rather serious tone with the concept of punishment and disobedience which I took as an attempt to strike fear within all that were listening (and probably hopeful of silencing any doubts that may arise should everyone not already be cowering in fear of the "Voice").
Reflecting now on the rebelliousness at 16 candles, I just had to shoot my big mouth off "So where did all the water go? Mathematically the H20 in the clouds would never add up to the kind of volume needed for every piece of landmass to be submerged... and how did that kill all the sea creatures, or did they have fish tanks in there to keep everything too? Including whales?"
Well never mind about the sea creatures....
Not pausing to letup in case my target has a chance to recoup and re-org, I went on..."Now we all know that in order for rain to fall it first has to be evaporated from water bodies to be formed into the proper clouds that comes back down as rain? Or are what we studied in Geography and Science classes all wrong?"
Letting in only the briefest of pause to sink in the silence that is fast enveloping the entire room, safe for the creaky but ever rotating ceiling fans, "So if that much water is first evaporated off to enable raining 40 days and 40 nights non-stop, then wouldn't the sea level have dropped significantly? Still if all the water came back down it would only have returned everything to what it was before. In fact right after it stop it will still take some time for whatever water that fell on land to make their way back to water bodies.. there's no way in hell the entire world can be submerged! Therefore if it really happened, the water will first have to magically appear from somewhere and again magically disappear afterwards for things to return to normal...."
I knew I was on track and the onslaught had just about covered every fucking angle but to nail it off... "The only other thing left is the ice in the North and South pole. Maybe there is enough to cover a large extent of the land mass... but probably still not all. Give it the benefit of the doubt that it can but it's said that it came down as RAIN!. Even if all the rain came from ice..it first have to be evaporated. But if that is the case, then it would not need to have that 40 days of rain again. And it would also be another miracle-- in fact an even bigger miracle than this 40 days rain thing that all the ice can melt in such a short time..."
(ok this was 1986, there was no "Google" nor were there that much computer simulation to see how Earth looked like without all the ice. In fact today we know that even if these melted, it still wouldn't cover all the landmass on this planet. Sure, a lot of people will die, move away from coastal area. But, no, the entire planet is not gonna be submerged underwater.
I was cut off.
Just like that...
Those earlier words were carried away with each whoosh from the fan blades above... then it was a moment of Enlightenment-- I finally understood the meaning of "ostracize"
Oh the sudden blinding flash of torment, anguish, greyness all in that split second for speaking what I see as the truth came crashing down hard... something I only realize years later as what may be described as a part of an Existentialist's blues...Certainly the feeling of forlornness and subsequently of being indifferent would have arisen from having to demarcate oneself from the thronging mass of religulous-ness.
Then I look towards the heavens and found myself uttering under own muted breath "Fuck you fan."
Was that how Galileo felt a few hundred years ago?
Ok -- One- I broke the cardinal rule of uttering (considered swearing) the word "hell" in my outpour.
Two... they hate the word "magic" or "magical" in the context of how it's used it-- probably close to outright blasphemy in those sensitive believing minds. After all I was in school and attending Bible study lesson (an examinable subject for Cambridege "O" level). I doubted and mocked the divinity of their belief by using the word magic in a mocking fashion.
End of story..... needless to say I never experience any spirit coursing through my body that changed my mind to believe in fairy tales thereafter either... Spirit of the 80% proof kind is a different story though ;)
Ok don't even get me started on the marsupials or if there were some Neolithic version of a Subzero fridge to store the penguin pairs and return them to Antarctica subsequently... but with the shitload of work I'm having, it will have to wait another 5-10 years before I was able to throw those into any further dis-proving equations.
