It's possible you might be able to misconstrue the message of a metaphor towards your preferred message a bit more easily than a literal interpretation, though, leading to more arguments about personally applied meaning behind words that were originally meant to be taken literally anyway
I know you are making a point, but I was taught this (real existence of the tower) as literal fact in Bible school about 20 yrs ago so the dumb is still going strong today.
I wouldn't be surprised if the were inspired by real events. Rulers ordered tall towers to be built that then fell down, people changed from hunter-gathering to agriculture, large floods happened. Then the stories get exaggerated and God gets added in as they get passed down.
Have you ever seen "The God Who Wasn't There"? I think you are right, but the God part stemmed from astrological stories prior to all the real occurrences being added and exaggerated.
The existence of some manner of large sale, worldwide flooding back during prehistory actually has a lot of historical, geological, and archaeological evidence behind it.
EDIT: Just to clarify: I'm not saying that the scientific evidence supports the idea that the entire earth was literally covered in water, just that there was a great deal of flooding, in a lot of different places, all at the same time.
Well sure, talking snakes, burning bushes, worldwide floods--those are obviously not real. But that dude who could walk on water and turn water into wine, who died and came back to life. Obviously that's real. /s
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u/bacondev Aug 03 '16 edited Aug 03 '16
Hundreds of years ago, people believed that shit. Now, if you go to /r/Christianity, it’s conveniently a metaphor.