Is this a serious thing?

The folks looking for the Ark of the Covenant and Noah’s Ark and such in our day strike we modern sophisticates as humorous and absurd  but the people living in an earlier age weren’t quite so enlightened as we clearly are (look at the news).   On his third voyage to the “New” World Columbus notes with astonishment in his diary the size of the Orinoco River mouth and the amount of fresh water pouring into the Atlantic.  He speculates that it may be one of the Rivers of Paradise!  They believed in those days folks and the truth is that for the past two millennia most Christians in most places have taken the stories in Genesis more or less literally.  The educated simply adapted their views to accommodate the current cosmology.  The idea of a relatively recent creation that resembled our present world died hard (and of course it still lives among way too many Americans).