Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
No.
a) The existence of an afterlife would mean that those people were not destroyed. They had a really bad day and then woke up someplace else.
b) The story of the flood, in itself, may be a parable (by which I mean, a story intended to teach a lesson, usually of a moral or ethical nature, without necessarily being true) like the parable of the Good Samaritan, or the story of the Garden of Eden.
c) There may have been reason for the flood.
Any one of these alternatives could answer your question; personally, I think (b) is the most likely, though (a) and (c) are also possible.
If it's a parable, isn't the parable about the fact that certain actions like gay sex are bad enough that they warrant a God engaging in genocide? Even if the God didn't actually commit the genocide but merely wanted to make the point that doing so is justified, that still seems bad to me.