From: "James Wynn" 
Subject: RE: (urth) A Point of Order
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 11:30:21 -0500

Tsk. Tsk. Blattid, Blattid, Blattid, I just cannot let this one pass. ;-)

If I accept your argument, then G-d didn't destroy the earth with water the
first time since Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives all survived along
with lots of animals (a protection, please note, that the New Sun did not
provide). So why make the promise in the first place? The survivors of
Usha's Deluge sailed for some time before arriving at that island -
commensurate with the receding of the waters ala Noah's Flood. Nope. If the
World is not "destroyed by flood" with the advent of the New Sun then there
IS no destroying by flood.

Ge 8:21-22
...the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more
for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth;
neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and
summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Ge 9:11
And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut
off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a
flood to destroy the earth.

-- Crush

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes [mailto:ddanehy@siebel.com]
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 11:03 AM
To: 'urth@urth.net'
Subject: (urth) A Point of Order

God does promise Noah that He will not again destroy all the world by
water.

The coming of the White Fountain does not violate this promise, because
all the world is _not_ destroyed.

If "all the world" means the land masses, then it is not so much destroyed
as rearranged -- if the prophecies of the coming of the New Sun are as
accurate as they seem to be, the old continents are destroyed and new
continents arise. Sev winds up on an island in the middle of a vast sea;
but that's where a continent used to be. You wouldn't expect to find a
new continent right where the old one was.

If "all the world" means, as it does in many languages (e.g., French
"tout le monde"), "all the people in the world," then, again, this is
clearly not the case -- we see a few people saved; there is no particular
reason to assume that similar scattered people do not survive all over
the globe; indeed, though Wolfe's ultraDickensian tenedency toward
plotting-by-coincidence could in fact have Severian run across the
_only_ survivors, combining that with (some of) them also being folks
he already knows one way or another seems, to me, excessive; more likely
there are a number of survivors and Synchronicity Central brings him to
the ones he knows.

--Blattid
                                    Republicans must always be on guard
                                against sounding Teutonic. -- P. Noonan


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