I sat through yet another unispiring sermon this Sunday and it happened to hit on one of those stories from the OT that I have always avoided thinking about because it proved difficult to reconcile with the old"it's all true in there" mantra of the Southern Baptist Convention in which I was brought up.  The story was the tower of Babel tale from Genesis chapter 11 I believe.  I read through it and didn't think well if I believe in an all powerful God then it is at least possible, however unlikely, instead I thought, this is just ridiculous. 

God worries that we may be capable of accomplishing anything because we have one common language?  Give me a break, it is obviously a simple story to explain why different people speak languages that are strange and unusual to them.  Why does it have to be in there, unless like so many other stories it is simply an explanatory fable.  Which is fine as long as it isn't represented as vital and important to hold as truth in faith.  Because if that is the case then I can't buy the validity of the text.

So either it is "true" from cover to cover and I think the whole thing is a crock, or I have to pick and choose which things are "real miracles" and which ones are just stories to explain a phenomena or relate a moral truth.  If it's the second, then I have to question everything from creation through the miracles of Jesus.  So without the miracles is Jesus just a guy with some nice ideas?  If so, I can deal with that, I think they are good ideas on the whole, but the concept of seeing him as some sort of savior then loses validity in my mind.  If he didn't really turn water to wine, then maybe he didn't quite defeat that whole death thing.  If that is the case then the moral authority of the book is gone for me.  What purpose is there in using it as any more than a guideling to treating others in the way we want to be treated?

Now if I can take the Jesus stuff as truth and real, then can I just drop the rest of it?  I think so, beyond what he said I don't see much authority in the words of men.  It is said that all scripture is "God breathed" but that comes from the scripture, so I could just as easily say this post is God breathed.  I don't have to back it up with any proof, it's my word against yours.  I haven't decided yet if I accept Jesus stuff to be truth, I look at the nature of the universe and this world and find it hard to imagine it all as random and accidental, but I find the idea that we have even the slightest inkling of what God is, or was, or wants, or thinks equally hard to imagine.  And that would include the Bible. 

There are alot of things that Jesus said about how to treat people, but he didn't lay down a lot of specific rules from what I can tell, more like good guidelines that appeal to the average person's sense of right and wrong.  Those rules seem to come from everyone else who claim to know what God is trying to tell us and is choosing them to let us in on it.  If Joel Osteen or Rick Warren come out next week and say that God spoke to them and gave them a "new book" of rules relating to modern life and morally ambiguous situations we would say they were off their nut, but why do I assume that Paul was any less potentially insane?  Because he says he wasn't and someone along the way validated it and called it scripture?  I find it harder and harder to buy.  It sounds like a long string of men with pens and power standing behind a "God curtain" and telling us to keep our eyes shut and our ears open, and not to pay any attention to the men behind the curtain. 

If you want to give me a new Bible that only has the red letters and leaves off everything else, including the biographers opinions of what was meant in the words in red, then I can give it some thought.  Like I said, I haven't closed the door to that room just yet, but since I increasingly see God as the absentee landlord, I doubt it stays open much longer.