A couple weeks back I got into a conversation with a dude who worked the snack counter at a movie theater. He was mentioning that some Christians had given him a hard time for merely being associated with the un-Biblical retelling of Noah's story. He added that he thought is was an awesome movie -- massive fountains springing from the earth, stone giants, ... 

Wait. Hold on one moment there. Did I hear "stone giants"? I may have been on the fence about seeing the flick, but stone mother fucking giants? Dude!

Back on the topic of the Christian approbation, I threw in my two cents that while it may be inconsistent with the Bible, the Bible, in turn, is inconsistent with the Epic of Gilgamesh. So they're both do overs. And the Bible doesn't even get the shape of the boat right. It's round, like a modern life raft. If you don't have a source of power, why would you have a long, skinny boat that could be turned sideways and rolled over by the waves? Those Babylonians were no dummies.

Anyway, expressed in the language of comic book literature, both the Bible story of Noah's flood and the current movie are retcons. And I think this is what has gotten the literalist Christian's panties twisted. It's not just the fact that Hollywood took liberties with their story. Whether or not the biblical literalists are aware of the concept of retcons, I think they are aware of the danger of their book being just so much fodder for story telling, like The Sleeping Beauty or The Amazing Spiderman.

Some would argue that there is nothing new with using this technique in mythology. Many aspects of the Abrahamic religions can be described using analogies to super hero stories.