After watching the preview to the movie Babel, I decided to refresh myself of the original story from the Bible.  This is what I found:

Genesis 11

The Tower of Babel

 1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As men moved eastward, ^[a] they found a plain in Shinar ^[b] and settled there.

 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel ^[c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

(This was obtained from www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2011;&version=31;  This looks to be a really good site for looking up Bible passages in several vesions/languages of the Bible.)

Several observations:

1) Mankind was one!  Had one language and worked together.

2) Mankind decides to do a project to keep them all together.  In this case build a tower to the heavens.

3) God sees that if mankind can do this, then mankind can do anything.

4) God decides that this is not good and creates language barriers between peoples.

Is it just me, or does this seem contrary to what we consider good today?  Don’t we consider it a good thing to break down these barriers and to have people work together?

Anyway, just some random thoughts.