Punished for Babel?

[Bad Writer]

The people were trying to get to heaven, not God. Which is why God thwarted their plan. They were trying to achieve perfection apart from the source.
They used man made materials, brick and tar, rather than stone and mortar, symbolising their own efforts over natural law.

I know I'm late coming to the party, but this sentence struck me as odd. If the story of the Tower of Babel was completely accurate, and this is the reasoning god used to thwart the plans of the people building, then why hasn't god reached out his almighty hand of Justice to crush our current endeavors to go beyond earth, beyond the solar system, to where no one has gone before?

If god is invisible, why would he need a physical home called heaven? And if it's not physical, then what was his worry that the people would even reach it?

I am by trade a linguist, and I know for a fact that languages have evolved. There was no sudden, sporadic splitting of languages. They progress, change, and adapt over time because of isolation (the parallels to the theory of biological evolution are astounding, btw!). If you look at the Romance languages, you can see that not only are Spain and Portugal on the same continent, these countries being in close proximity to one another, but, even though their languages are completely different, they are similar enough to where each nation can talk to and be understood by one another in their own, native tongues. I am fluent in Polish, and I can do the same thing with people from the Czech Republic.

If you take a map and trace the lineage of languages across the globe, they paint a startling, yet very real, picture of how they progressed, spread, and evolved over the history of humankind. To say that the Tower of Babel story is how these languages came to be is a gross misrepresentation of the facts, completely ignoring what history has proven otherwise to be the case. It's akin to taking one of Rudyard Kipling's stories of how things came to be and taking it as complete fact, which is a very irresponsible way to proceed with this.

It doesn't matter that the story of the Tower of Babel is in your scriptures: it's nothing more than a fable, and telling people it's true is lying to your fellowman.

BTW, Mormons believe that a group of people whose language was not corrupted at the time of the Tower of Babel because of their righteousness were led to America in 2000 B.C. This story is false on this assumption alone.