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Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 3:19 pm
The story is rather simplistic and clearly redolent of man knowing nothing of reason or the god in which he professed faith.
People were punished for attempting to build a tower to god. God's punishment was to alter their language so that they all spoke something different and thus could not complete the tower for being incapable of communicating with each other.
First of all, not much communication other than pointing needs to be done in order to construct an architecture.
Secondly, we know today that there is no way man could have reached god via a tower. Thus, god obviously knowing this, there was absolutely no reason to punish them for attempting something they could not accomplish had they even finished the project.
![[Image: I%20see%20no%20god%20up%20here%20-%20Yur...00x437.jpg]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.myconfinedspace.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Ftdomf%2F372947%2FI%2520see%2520no%2520god%2520up%2520here%2520-%2520Yuri%2520Gagarin-700x437.jpg)
Even space exploration could not procure evidence of such a deity who was so afraid of man trying to find him other than through blind faith.
Is there any real purpose of the story other than to display man's ignorance of god when he wrote the bible, especially when he claimed to be divinely inspired by the very being about which he was writing?
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 3:59 pm
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.
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 4:06 pm
(July 17, 2013 at 3:19 pm)Maelstrom Wrote: First of all, not much communication other than pointing needs to be done in order to construct an architecture.
I think a tower of any decent height would have required more than just pointing and grunting. God could have just let gravity and ground compaction do the job for him. Or high altitude and wind shear. Or any number of likely problems that would have arisen as they got higher than a few stories. Or be really sneaky and have them pile their bricks on one side of the structure and watch the whole thing just tip over. Instead, he sounded pretty worried. "Shit, if they build this and realize that the world isn't a flat disc with a clear bowl placed over it we are TOTALLY FUCKED. Quick, make up a whole bunch of different languages!!!"
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Quote:The people were trying to get to heaven, not God. Which is why God thwarted their plan.
Of course, only a fucking idiot would believe that. Do you believe it, Frods?
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Speaking as an idiot... Yes :p
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 4:14 pm
A group of men are gathered around a fire late at night two millenia ago. They've been traveling from village to village and city to city selling their goods and have met peoples speaking different languages. They wonder and discuss how this could happen. They have been to Egypt and seen the Great Pyramids.
They are also slightly drunk on this night, imagination takes flight and one of them writes it down the next day. Subsequently someone else thinks it's a plausable explanantion and includes it in a compendium of collected short stories that attempt to explain the world around them.
OK, maybe it didn't happen exactly like that but it is simply one more instance of man's attempt to explain the unknown. The problem arises when new knowledge is attained but some people refuse to abandon the old explanations.
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 4:49 pm
(July 17, 2013 at 3:19 pm)Maelstrom Wrote: The story is rather simplistic and clearly redolent of man knowing nothing of reason or the god in which he professed faith.
People were punished for attempting to build a tower to god. God's punishment was to alter their language so that they all spoke something different and thus could not complete the tower for being incapable of communicating with each other.
First of all, not much communication other than pointing needs to be done in order to construct an architecture.  Never been project lead on a build before, or you do not understand the skill set it takes to build anything remotely complicated. Try putting a big lego playset together by just pointing and grunting(Dont let anyone else see the box or instructions) and see if what your group builds looks anything like it is supposed to. If you do finish without killing each other it wont be right.
Quote:Secondly, we know today that there is no way man could have reached god via a tower.
If you actually read the story it was not about reaching God. It was about man's colliberation and the direction it would take us.
Quote: Thus, god obviously knowing this, there was absolutely no reason to punish them for attempting something they could not accomplish had they even finished the project.
Unless the project was a non-issue and what was being discouraged was the soceitial inferstructure created by man after said tower was built.
Quote:Even space exploration could not procure evidence of such a deity who was so afraid of man trying to find him other than through blind faith.
Is there any real purpose of the story other than to display man's ignorance of god when he wrote the bible, especially when he claimed to be divinely inspired by the very being about which he was writing?
It's funny that i do not know anyone of the faith who believes God punished anyone for building a tower. It's only after someone reads anti-God something is that idea ever planted.
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 5:06 pm
(This post was last modified: July 17, 2013 at 5:14 pm by Minimalist.)
(July 17, 2013 at 4:13 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: Speaking as an idiot... Yes :p
I always appreciated your honesty, Frods.
The problem there Drippy is that the Babylonians had no trouble completing the Ziggurat at Babel to its height of 300 feet. I grant you this must have seemed like a herculean task to the occasional Judahite goat herder who made his way there from a culture which had trouble building anything at all. No wonder they made up stories about it. The (very) Ancient Greeks did the same thing with the Palace of Knossos and even you should be able to imagine what an Amazonian tribesman would say were he suddenly to visit a modern city and then return to his hut.
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 6:26 pm
(This post was last modified: July 17, 2013 at 6:27 pm by MikeTheInfidel.)
The story is incoherent on several levels. The biggest one is that it says that all of mankind was speaking the same language. This is Genesis 11. One chapter back, in Genesis 10, it talks about the descendants of Noah's sons settling into their own territories, each with their own language.
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RE: Punished for Babel?
July 17, 2013 at 7:16 pm
(July 17, 2013 at 4:49 pm)Drich Wrote: Unless the project was a non-issue and what was being discouraged was the soceitial inferstructure created by man after said tower was built. Exactly! Thank you Drich. I've been trying to tell the Social Services people that forever. A few years back, I caught my 4 year old son trying to catch his shadow in the hallway. I knew he wasn't going to actually catch it. I just beat him senselessly because I didn't want him to harbor creativity or an imagination. Sometimes the real issue is below the surface. I wish everybody was as level headed as you Drich. (Completely made-up story by the way  )
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