(urth) flooding and scripture

[Marc Aramini]

On the flood and whether it is a transgression of scripture -
This is one case where the actual religion of the author has an influence on the way the book was written.  A strict perspicuous reading of scripture is NOT a feature of catholic orthodoxy.  Indeed, the bible itself and any contradictions contained therein can be dismissed out of hand since the bible was put together by men, and the first 11 chapters of genesis which may contradict any science or themselves are easily washed away by allegorical exegises, something literal minded protestants cannot do, who appeal to biblical ultimate biblical authority.
 
When talking to the literal reading protestant interviewer, Wolfe seems to slip back into an evasive tactic to deal with the problem of God breaking his word, but while writing, I think his original intention did not see a second deluge as a problem because genesis is an allegory in his mind, it is not a literal story, it is simply a nonfactual truth that reveals a deeper truth, so the details ARE NOT AS IMPORTANT AS THE SYMBOLIC TRUTH.
So he thinks for a second and says, I have multiple universal time lines, oh yeah, this is a different timeline, and solves the biblical problem in terms his protestant audience ideologically agrees with.
 
So he may change his story later when talking to protestants who cannot view portions of the bible as nonfactual and nonauthorititative because they tend to ideologically supplant the parts for the whole: well, if any part is untrue, the whole thing can be untrue.  Yet Gene, knowing full well that stories like that of the good samaritan are in the bible but ARE ONLY STORIES ANYWAY, and never existed except to highlight a more nonfactual but truer absolute truth, does not have to be concerned with the details of the symbols when creating, especially in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which are regarded as a story for primitive man in terms he could then understand, not being factual but being true none the less.  This is something that is absent for the most part in Protestant philosophy because it allows too much room for ecclesiastical interpretation and selection and can come to an abusive control over doctrine and policy - read, the Catholic
 church of the middle ages.  BUT ironically it makes Catholicism much more suited to surviving science.  Oh, those early chapters were just a story like the good samaritan to teach us God was real, that flood is a symbol of god's purification, and we need not be concerned with the exact details.
 
Just my Catholic opinion.  Maybe I'm wrong.
--- On Fri, 12/17/10, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:


In a previous discussion of this topic I found it a pretty compelling conclusion that
if Briah is Christian and Urth is Earth in the future then either:

1. God has broken his Covenant with humanity to never again send a Flood.

or

2. Severian, Tzadkiel and the White Fountain are (somehow) entirely secular and have nothing
to do with God.

or maybe..

3. Severian and everyone around him are not really humans so God was allowed to Flood earth again.



      
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