Water, Water Everywhere

A couple of weeks ago, I read Kent Ponder's "Jaredite Ship-Building Technology" on Richard Packham's website, and it really got me to thinking.

How did I ever become so convinced that the church was the One True Church that I threw common sense and critical thinking right out the door? 

• How much fresh water does it take to keep one person alive for 344 days?
• Did they have glass windows back in the day? Because I sure didn't think so. So of course there wouldn't be anything to be dashed to pieces by the waves.
• How many people were traveling in those air-tight barges?
• How many animals constituted the flocks and herds referred to in the book of Ether?
• How much food and fresh water, then, would be necessary to keep all of those people and animals alive for nearly a year?
• What about the puking?  Because me, I get incredibly motion sick, so I can imagine at least some of those people would have been seasick and vomiting.  There is reference made to their singing and praising God day and night.  How would that fit in with the vomiting? Enquiring minds want to know.  (And of course plenty of other bodily functions would have been going on, which would add to the frequent puking. I'm just sayin'.)
• Did they strap themselves and the animals in, so that when the barges flipped over in the ocean, the people and animals weren't being flung all over the place, breaking bones and, possibly, getting killed? Wouldn't it feel freaky to be strapped in and upside down? (More vomiting would be happening here.)  It sounds kind of like an amusement park ride that I would NOT be going on.
• What about if they opened up the wrong hole, and water started flooding in? Would they have been able to stopper it back up in time before the waters flooded in and drowned everyone?

But no, I somehow put all of my critical thinking skills aside and said, "Wow. The finger of God. Pretty dang cool, that."

Tune in next time when I talk about patriarchal blessings.