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I've been thinking about these sorts of things a long time, myself. One thing I found is that there are other ways to value the Bible besides thinkig it is has to be either "God's Word" (thereby it has to be perfect because God is perfect) or a "bunch of stories" like you said. When someone says "a bunch of stories" to me it seems to belittle the documents in the Bible. I don't think we need to do that. I don't think you intended that, right? There are other good options to valuing the literature of the Bible that respect the culture and writers of these documents. After all, it's a book of rich imagery, myth, cultural viewpoints, personal accounts, and yes, there are stories - good ones that teach interesting lessons - and there is much wisdom to be found between those two covers, in my view it is mostly found in Ecclesiates and parts of Proverbs, for instance. But IMO it should not be my only rule of faith and practice, nor should I attribute to it qualities it does not have. And it is unfair of me to expect it to apply to me today in most instances. That's where we run into trouble accusing people of not being believers like they did in the epistles of Paul. But that's another long story... Anyway, I think one thing we face in this discussion is VPW's tendency to pose EITHER/OR questions. That thinking forces us to make a choice between only those two ways of looking at the Bible. It rules out FOR US any other ways. I know one thing, it certainly intimidated me from investigating other ways and making up my own mind. This is a big topic, so I'll stop for now. My intention here is just to shed a little more light on this subject than I did in the article on the front page. Cheers!