CHRISTIANS PLEASE EXPLAIN "tower of babel"

[Jacob(smooth)]

Don't do that. Seriously. Someone will put 2 and 2 together and decide that that is evidence the moon landings were a fake.

Holy shit! You're right! They were faked!

Shit. See what you did there mister agenda

[truthBtold]

U cant dismiss stuff in the bible, ur god inspired it. Take it as a whole or nothing..Thats cherry picking

My god? You fucking dolt, take a look at my religious views. Pull your head out of your ass while you're at it. All or nothing, are you sith or something? Are you now going to argue that works of fiction have no value?

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!! And I thought I was recently doing a good job of being polite. There's one New Year's resolution down the shitter.

Now now... potty mouth... im gonna give u a kudos if u play nice.. thats not how u spell that f word... did ur computer key get stuck..

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U cant dismiss stuff in the bible, ur god inspired it. Take it as a whole or nothing..Thats cherry picking

Young brother.

A gentle suggestion. I suspect you laugh at theists when they try to tell you what you believe, as if the mere tag "atheist" encompasses the whole gambit of your world view. Atheists are all homosexual is a view I saw expressed in all seriousness on this forum from a theist. Its nonsense of course.

It is equally as illogical when you, as a atheist, generalize and presume about what theists believe. Doubly so when the person you are talking to is NOT a theist. . Bit of an epic fail there, Cato was in fact trying to help you.

Some theists, I'm one, cherry pick unapologetically. Some believe the bible is not inerrant. You don't get to tell other people to "take it as a whole or nothing", because your views on WHAT CHRISTIANS R LIKE hold all the significance of a puff of warm hydrogen to me, Cato, or anyone else here.

Chill, brethren. Take a breath. Consider the question I asked you, what do you wish to achieve with these caps heavy and repetitive threads?

See now thats the way a person should talk to someone. .. I like ur style.. ur getting a kudos... and my RESPECT...

[Drich]

Maybe (just a suggestion to help you avoid any future embarassment) you should start with the verse in question rather than the straw man arguement that Atheist typically use to make the arguement you just made.

In the account in Genesis the purpose was not to see God but to make a name for themselves among men. They were looking to unify themselves with this project.

4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

as such God did not confuse their language because they would breach the walls of heaven as most of you imply.

God confused their language because for man to be unified at that time in our history/development would set us on a course that was no consistant with His plan of salvation.
“Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.

Notice the bold part. Also notice God did not say He confused their language to keep them from breaching the gates of Heaven, but rather allow man the power to choose his own destiny at that point in our development.

once again...trying too hard to give an answer because u failed to read/study ur own bible.. primative men thought the earth was a flat disk with a dome over it,, and thinking that if they can get over the top of the dome they would be in heaven.. NEXT!!

If that were the case, then Why doesn't genesis 11 reflect your version of the story?

[Minimalist]

Jesus H Christ on a fucking crutch. This is just more shit copied from the Babylonians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmerkar_an..._of_Aratta

Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is a legendary Sumerian account, of preserved, early post-Sumerian copies, composed in the Neo-Sumerian period (ca. 21st century BC). It is one of a series of accounts describing the conflicts between Enmerkar, king of Unug-Kulaba (Uruk), and the unnamed king of Aratta (probably somewhere in modern Iran or Armenia).

Because it gives a Sumerian account of the "confusion of tongues", and also involves Enmerkar constructing ziggurats at Eridu and Uruk, it has, since the time of Samuel Kramer,[1] been compared with the Tower of Babel narrative in the Book of Genesis.

Try to imagine some Judahite dragged off to Babylon from the minor little shithole that was Jerusalem in the 6th century and he sees the grand palaces and ziggurats while he is still trying to get the dog shit out from between his toes. Don't you think they would be amazed by the wonders they observed?

[truthBtold]

once again...trying too hard to give an answer because u failed to read/study ur own bible.. primative men thought the earth was a flat disk with a dome over it,, and thinking that if they can get over the top of the dome they would be in heaven.. NEXT!!

If that were the case, then Why doesn't genesis 11 reflect your version of the story?

My friend u are highly mistaken... I use the original hebrew bible.. not the watered down version u must have

[Ryantology]

Like most stories of the OT, it's a metaphor for a capricious and hateful man reveling in abusing his slaves for daring to act independently.

[Brakeman]

There's been a bit of focus on the imaginary building, of which couldn't have been built to anything as described at the time, but nothing about the WOOHOO magic spell that god cast on these poor desert cavemen. How exactly did the magic spell work? Did the workmen go home suddenly speaking French? We know languages don't work that way now, but ignorant goat fuckers in the middle east didn't.

So Theists, did god's nose twitch like Samantha on "Bewitched" when he cast this big confounding language spell? Was he senile like her old aunt Agatha and mess it up? Was he trying to do a "don't build" spell and just messed it up into a language spell. Tell us, we don't know WooHoo magic so well.

[Chad32]

He speaks, and things happen. Naming magic, perhaps?

[xpastor]

God confused their language because for man to be unified at that time in our history/development would set us on a course that was no consistant with His plan of salvation.
“Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.

Notice the bold part. Also notice God did not say He confused their language to keep them from breaching the gates of Heaven, but rather allow man the power to choose his own destiny at that point in our development.

As usual, Drich mishandles language and logic. How is being able to effect one's proposals incompatible with free will, the power to choose one's own destiny?

As a couple of people have noted, the point of the story (copied from the Babylonian) is to explain for the primitive mind why there are many different languages.

Go back a few chapters to find out why many people have a phobia about snakes and why childbirth is painful.

[Sword of Christ]

You can see it as a parable for trying to construct something in place of God such as naturalism or something that you think will lead to heaven that isn't God such as a philosophical or political system. God will come down upon it and ultimately smash all your efforts rendering your work futile. Though I'm sure it may have been based on some kind of historical near eastern building that collapsed in Earthquake and this made its way into Jewish folklore. It's also an attempt to explain why people have languages and such and back then it would have made as much sense as anything else. If you go back far enough there may well have been a single language shared by the people of Eurasia and the near east you can trace back common roots.