I started to write a comment on the blog and it meandered and grew huge.  Rather than post it in three different comments daisy chained together, I felt that it deserved a blog of its own.  Besides, Puft's blog has started to turn into a monster. 

My original comment: 

Sure, Rollo, but there is a massive suspension of logic and reason to accept every word (of the bible) as literal truth. So do you believe in a 6,000 year old universe based on bible geneology? Do you believe in a global flood that involved enough water to cover all the land mass of theplanet? Do you believe it's possible toput 2-7 members of each of the worlds several million species of animal on aboat for months? I'm not assuming you're a dumbass, I'm just proposing that some people's unreasoning faith is...unreasoning.

Rollo's reply:  Yes Tom I do believe what you have just presented. To me it isn't anymore ludacris then believing in the Big bang theory or the Theory of Evolution.

See, that's what I'm saying, Rollo.  You come across as a reasonable, educated person.  I don't agree with you much of the time, but that doesn't disqualify you from being intelligent.  The Big Bang and Evolution can be supported through observation and testing.  If you chose to educate yourself on the subjects, it's pretty compelling evidence. 

You can't, however, come up with enough water to cover all the Earth's landmasses.  That would increase the radius of the Earth by 5 1/2 miles with water.  That's 3,623,942,367 cubic kilometers of water you'd have to find.  That's more than all of the water in all of the oceans, lakes, rivers, ice caps, and water vapor on the planet combined.  That's just enough to come up to the very tip of Mount Everest.  That's not a very likely scenario. 

Not counting plants, fungus, and single celled organisms that wouldn't survive a global flood.  There are about 1.2 million animal species (possibly as many as 5 million).  But let's just count the vertebrates.  That's just under 60,000 that we know of for sure (and have catelogged).  The bible says that at least two each of these were put on the arc.  That's just the 'unclean' ones, I believe the 'clean' animals had 7 each but let's keep the numbers small.  That's 120,000 animals on a boat.  They stayed on the boat for over 150 days.  We tried to keep 20,000 people in the Superdome after Katrina for less than a month and look what happened.

Some of these stories are just too incredible to believe.  It's just amazing to me that otherwise rational and intelligent people can accept things like this as absolute truth without question is amazing.  Is it because you feel that your faith in God will be at risk if you consider any single part of the bible as outlandish?

Believe me, I'm not trying to be a dick.  I'd tell you if I was.  I'm just trying to understand.