Well, PissedOffGuy, why don't you stop complaining about where you live and your neighbors and go back to Iraq? It sounds like you could try to be a better neighbour yourself.

To try to get back on topic. People who take a literal view of the Bible, the Koran or any other mythology are peasants, pure and simple. Technology changes much more quickly than people, and peasants are still very much a part of society. The muselmen who crap and pee all over toilets to face Mecca, the christians who advocate persecuting or even killing abortion doctors and black people. The brain-dead who send television evangelists their money. They are all modern day peasants, just as superstitious and easily lead as in the dark ages.

The bible is very interesting if you look past the superstitious nonsense and try to decipher the history, law and social structure of the ancient civilisation that it came from. This is some of the world's earliest writing, and it gives some insight as to how these people lived.

One story that I particularly like is the Tower of Babel. It is squeezed in between the story of Noah and The Call of Abraham as an explanation of how suddenly everyone, all decendents of one man, speaks different languages.

The tower itself was most likely based on a real building, a seven tier ziggurat in Babylon with a temple to Marduk at the top. It was called Etemenanki, "House of the Foundation of Heaven on Earth." The temple was considered the axis of heaven and earth, the steps were the proverbial stairway to heaven.

The Hebrews didn't like the Babylonians, hence they were the bad guys in their stories, though their mythology is obviously derived from them. In this story, the mathematicians in Babylon were so conceated as to think they could surpas God's authority and build their own tower to heaven. God came down, and saw they really could do it, and therefore no longer need him, muddled up their language.

The building was in existence before writing and survived until the time of Alexander the Great. Today it is a big square hole in the ground without even a road for tourists to go and see it.

To think that this story is true is just silly, but I would be entertained to hear the christians' on the forum give a literal explanation. Please tell me how, with enough people speaking the same language, I can build a tower to heaven in my carpark (I don't have a garden, I live in an apartment, so the carpark will have to do).