Bill D is right. The Moyers article is very disturbing. This is not the first time I have read about the phenomenon in the press. There is something quite inhuman in the desire to help God destroy the world and the (presumably non-Christian)people in it. Can't He do it at his own pace? Their eagerness to see us all go up in smoke so that they can get to Heaven faster (and I suppose gain additional favor there for "helping God out") is psychopathic narcissism pure and simple.

Which brings me back to Noah and the core of belief. I think that the liberal theology so well expounded by Joe Offer and some others in this thread is hard to support from the Bible. While liberal theologians agree that certain stories in the Bible are best understood as myth or symbol because they are clearly impossible, other key elements seem to be equally unbelievable, but are accepted because without them the entire structure seems to collapse.

God showed Noah the rainbow to assure him and other believers for centuries to come that He would never again destroy the world by water. But then Revelation tells us that He will indeed destroy the world once and for all by fire. This is logically consistent, of course, but is God such an equivocator? Surely He did not expect the Jews to think that since He specified "not by water" what He really meant was "destruction will come anyway, obviously by fire"!

And finally, before I bid farewell, how is it that God presides over mass slaughters of Israel's enemies in the Old Testament, demanding on some occasions that his people kill and burn even more than they did, yet in the New Testament becomes a God of Peace urging us always to turn the other cheek? Neither strategy is entirely appealing, but if God is eternally perfect and unchanging, how could He possibly change from being "a Man of war," as he is described in the Old Testament, into being the "Prince of Peace" in the New? And even as Prince of Peace, He offers "a sword."

I do not ask these questions to challenge or subvert anyone's benign and generous faith. They are simply additional reasons why after years of trying to believe in a present and benevolent deity, it has become quite impossible for me. Even without two World Wars and the Holocaust, and earthquakes and tidal waves, ghastly diseases such as cancer, botulism, and Ebola, which have nothing whatever to do with human free will, should be enough to discredit the understandably wishful thinking of the major religions.