60 Minutes distastefully disdains Noah's Story

By Edgar on Nov 15, 2009 | 1104 views

While waiting for the Amazing Race (the wife is a big fan), I caught 60 Minutes': Iraq's Marshlands: Resurrecting Eden.

CBS Image: Iraq's Marshlands

The story started with great shots of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the marshlands that beautifully decorate the landscape.

The story continued and CBS dazzled me with more HD video and I listened carefully as I was re-fed the urban legend that the Tigris and Euphrates valley was the cradle of civilization where agriculture, the alphabet and the wheel were invented. Yeah, yeah, yeah...

And all was well until Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes decided, out of nowhere, to make the following comment:

The story goes that the gods grew angry at man, so they sent a deluge to cover the Earth. One of the gods thought that was a terrible idea, so he warned one man to build a boat and save all the animals.

The people of this region came up with that story hundreds of years before the Old Testament gave us Noah. (CBS.com, my emphasis)

Ding - ding - ding. The bell went off and that's when I woke up from my HD fantasy land.

What I disliked the most was that Pelley makes himself sound so scholarly. He makes a statement and has a few laughs with his new best friend: Azzam.

"Yeah, those primitive chimps!"

Pelley should have told us where he got his flood information.

Did Moses copy his fable from the Samarians? Is that what Pelley is really saying?

Does Pelley know that the Global Flood Story is not unique to the Old Testament. Similar stories are recorded over 200 times from different cultures around the world. Moses never claimed his was the only one ever written.

Finally - does 60 Minutes know Surah 71 also tells Noah's flood story?

I would've loved to hear Pelley said:

"The people of this region came up with that story -- thousands of years before the Quran gave us the flood story..."

Now - that would've been scholarly.

Watch video, here.

5 comments

Comment from: Bob Van Zandt [Visitor]

Amazing...

Thanks for posting this Edgar. I recorded but hadn't watched 60 minutes yet.. Now I'm in conflict -- I want to watch it just for the sake of seeing the stupidity of this guy, but, at the same time, I don't want to give them the ratings..

11/15/09 @ 20:04

Comment from: Martha Cable [Visitor]

Thank you very much for your informative post. I also saw the 60 minutes segment and was confused as to what Pelley was trying to say. At first I thought he was trying to say that the flood in the Old Testament must have occurred after the Samarian flood, but now it appears he is trying to mock Moses for writing about something that was already written. Either way,he was being quite glib about it and inferred that such an occurrence did not happen. In the end he can't mock God so I won't be bothered. It was an interesting segment, but, just like you, I was just waiting for The Amazing Race. Go Globetrotters!