Noah's Ark is not as cute or innocent as we want to think

For forty days and forty nights, God flooded the world to wipe out the entire human race except for Noah, his family, and an ark filled with the animals of the world.

Some believe it really happened.  Some believe it describes a flood in a local area.  Some believe it's a moral play, meant to illustrate a lesson.

For the literalists, there are plenty of problems.  There's no way to account for where the water came from or where it all went.  Such a deluge of water would have diluted the saltwater oceans, destroying the ecosystems and turning them into a barren waste.  Caring for and feeding all of the animals would have required resources far beyond anything on the ark - many animals would have required particular food from their parts of the world, for example.  Then after the ark landed, the animals would have starved since all the plants in the world would have died, and the carnivores would have finished off whatever was in the ark.  And who knows how the marsupials got back to Australia, the penguins to Antarctica, and so on.

In an odd act of hypocracy, God's reason for killing everyone is that they're too violent.  Noah is 600 years old.  He offers a blood animal sacrifice to the God who hates violence, and God is pleased with it.  After killing so many of his children, God institutes a law of capital punishment.  God promises not to drown everyone again, so he invents rainbows to remind himself.  Their inbreeding re-populates the planet and Noah dies 350 years later, now nearly 1,000 years old.

In light of the many problems with the flood, many Mormons view it as a small, local flood.*  This may not work, however.

A global flood explains much of LDS theology.  Joseph taught that the Garden of Eden was in the Americas, and that Adam and Eve eventually settled in a place called Adam-ondi-Ahman in present day Missouri.  This was also revealed in the Doctrine and Covenants.  The Flood transported the ark to the Middle East where civilization began again.

In the beginning, after the earth was prepared for man, the Lord commenced his work upon what is now called this American continent, where the Garden of Eden was made. In the days of Noah, in the days of the floating of the ark, he took the people to another part of the earth: the earth was divided, and there he set up his kingdom. (Journal of Discourses 8:195)

Men have supposed that because the Ark rested on Ararat that the flood commenced there, or rather that it was from thence the Ark started to sail. But God in His revelations has informed us that it was on this choice land of Joseph where Adam was placed and the Garden of Eden was laid out. (Journal of Discourses 11:337)

As civilization began to flourish in the Middle East, they eventually began construction of the Tower of Babel.  At this point, another faithful family returned to the American continent via submersible barges.

Without a global flood, LDS theology has difficulty explaining how humanity got from the Americas to the Middle East.

Moses 7:42-45
Abraham 1:19

Modern Mormon prophets and leaders have also taught that it is a literal, global flood:

There was the great Flood, when waters covered the earth and when, as Peter says, only eight souls were saved  – Gordon B. Hinckley, If We Are Prepared Ye Shall Not Fear, 175th Semi-Annual General Priesthood Meeting

In spite of the world’s arguments against the historicity of the Flood, and despite the supposed lack of geologic evidence, we Latter-day Saints believe that Noah was an actual man, a prophet of God, who preached repentance and raised a voice of warning, built an ark, gathered his family and a host of animals onto the ark, and floated safely away as waters covered the entire earth. We are assured that these events actually occurred by the multiple testimonies of God’s prophets. – Donald W. Parry, The Flood and the Tower of Babel, Ensign, 1998

Of course Prophets and church leaders could be wrong about their beliefs. So let's assume that there are reasonable and rational explanations for the entire story, and that it's primarily meant to teach a spiritual lesson, not necessarily true history.

Even if this were the case, the story still fails.

God comes right out and kills everyone because they aren't doing what he wants them to - an interesting response for a God who values free will.  However immoral the people of Earth supposedly were, none of them had committed global genocide.  This is not a lesson of morality, but of terror and intimidation.  What makes this even more grotesque is that it's being passed off as a children's story.

There are hundreds of children's storybooks, puzzles, games, videos, wallpaper, and toys all depicting Noah's Ark with his smiling animals friends.  Somehow, the true horror of this story is overlooked.  It's almost as if we know its terror and cannot reconcile it with a loving God.  God destroys every living thing on the planet, including pregnant women and infants, and we repackage the story like it's a Disney cartoon.

I suspect that's the power of cognitive dissonance. When faced with two ideas so absurdly contradictory, yet both must be believed on some level, we've got to manipulate them to better fit together.

Either global catastrophe needs to be less horrible, or God has to be short-tempered and violent.  Or, being as gracious as possible, God has to be willing to commit the most horrible of acts in the name of some greater good.  Which isn't really any better:

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil they set out to destroy.  -- Christopher Dawson

Not wanting to allow for God to be a terrorist, we've decided that it's the slaughter that gets reinterpreted.  So we add a rainbow and furry bunnies, forgetting the millions of corpses under the waves and the God who put them there.

*(Reference added.  Thanks Incognito for suggesting there should be one.)