Curious?

[moementum7]

Why, when we as men were able to come together and acheive glorious things, in the bible it says that we came together,we all spoke one language and built a great building that reached into the heavens.
God saw this and divided men into different places and also split up our speech so we could not understand each other.

Was there a purpose for doing this,or was this just another strange and mysterious way?
Very serious and curious about this.
Thanks.

 

[Redoubtable]

God smote them and their project because the tower was conceived in sinful hubris and raised in presumtive defiance. One cannot assert one's authority over another without causing pain or discomfiture for the other. I.e. if you must rule, you must hurt.

 

[moementum7]

Thanks

Please ellaborate further.
Hubris?
Let me get this right.
Our basic nature in accordance to gods ruling is to be hurt?
Really? That sucks.

I don't remember god specifically saying not to build this monument.
Don't you think they would have listened if a god actually told them in person not to do something?

Defiance of what?
Not to progress?
I don;t get it?

Please explain further, and please use words that dumbasses like me can relate to.
Thank you
I appreciate your time on this matter.

P.S. I remember distinctly that it was because of our ability to make all things possible that god became upset.

Does this mean that he never wants us to all get along?
Thanks

 

[Redoubtable]

Re: Thanks

Originally posted by moementum7
Hubris?

It means "pride".

Our basic nature in accordance to gods ruling is to be hurt?
Really? That sucks.

Any being, be he divinity or man, must eventually, to maintain his authority, cause hurt to his subjects.
That is why He cast Lucifer into the Pit.

I don't remember god specifically saying not to build this monument.
Don't you think they would have listened if a god actually told them in person not to do something?

Disobedience to His command is not the sin for which He punished them. He punished them for their arrogant impudence. They had sought to equal Him and, in effect, usurp Him. They thought themselves virtuous enough to saunter into Heaven with or without His sanction.

Defiance of what?
Not to progress?

Defiance and disrespect to the Throne and Kingdom of God

P.S. I remember distinctly that it was because of our ability to make all things possible that god became upset.

No, God was righteously upset because they had used this inherent creativity and industiousness to erect a megalith that stood against His Kingdom. They had dared to think that they might reach His crystal battlements and enter through His adamantine gate.

Does this mean that he never wants us to all get along?

No, it means He feels that we shouldn't place ourselves atop a pedestal beside Him.

 

[moementum7]

Thanks for your time unfortunately I have run out.
One last question.
"Any being, be he divinity or man, must eventually, to maintain his authority, cause hurt to his subjects.
That is why He cast Lucifer into the Pit."

Does this mean that it is unnavoidable being under gods rule that we will all eventually be thrown into the pit?
Thanks again

How do we not be hurt?
Or how do we escape his rule?
Peace Out

 

[Redoubtable]

The Pit signifies the sentence of ultimate damnation, complete depivation of God's blessing, that which is existence. Some would argue that this is not a blessing, but a forced onus. Regardless, the the Pit is nonexistence, Oblivion.

Satan and his ilk have yet to be destroyed, but they are still far removed from God.

Satan clings fiercely to one last tuft of grass on the edge of the precipice, with his feet hanging down into the abyss. That tenuous tuft represents his own hubris, his own spite and pent-up rage. Hanging there, his very existence became dependent on that flimsy hatred, and he was transformed from the Morning Star, who stood with Ophaniel, Rikbiel, and Zophiel, the greatest of the Cherubim, to the Prince of Hell. He became his own hate, his own sin.

Likewise, those who sin against God will hang above the Oblivion by their own sins. They will hang by their treachery, their pandering, their gluttony, their heresy, and, most of all, their hate. They'll cling to the one thing left after God's abandonment. This will be their Hell, until the Final Day when the maw of the Lowermost Pit opens wide and swallows them utterly.

The Elect, the saved, will also hang by their sins over the Pit, and pay for their disobedience, their errings. This will be their purgatory, wherein they will repent, accept God's forgiveness, and be absolved of sin. On the Final Day they will be taken up from there by the silver strings of Redemption and welcomed into eternity.
Please note that Lucifer, his fellows, or any of the Damned could at any time before the Final Day accept God's forgiveness and by His grace return to His Flock.
Salvation comes by Grace alone. This Grace was made evident by the agonies of the Christ.

For a being of authority there is only need to chastise, or pain, those who transgress his order. Purgatory is only for the sinful and repentent. To be forgiven, one must be penitent, experiencing remorse. This remorse is the punishment God inflicts upon the repentent.
Hell is for the sinful and unrepentent. It is the damnation which God inflicts upon those who will not repent; it is the doom of inevitable destruction. It is the insatiable fire into which the chaff is tossed, to burn and be destroyed.

God is perfection; it is not in His nature to abide sin, or imperfection. Therefore, it cannot exist in His presence. This is why He cast out Lucifer. This is why He must cause hurt for those who would repent and come to Him and why he must destroy the Fallen and the chaff who refuse to be cleansed.

If you wish to avoid Remorse or Hell and eventual destruction, you would try to be sinless according to God's word. Even so, this is impossible for Man, who is conceived in the filth of Original Sin and is thus wont to disobey the Father.

 

[Balerion]

But again, the fact that the Tower story even happened goes against the characteristics God is accredited with. He is omnipotent, correct? Then he would have known, from the moment he decided to create Man, what Man would do. He would know that Man would build a tower, and eventually be splintered and given different languages.

The point being, why allow it to happen, if he knew that it was going to happen?

How can God be testing us if he already knows what we do? Becuase if what we ultimately do in our lives is already known, it is pre-destined, hence, it's already been decided. There would be no purpose to this life, no choise in anything we do, and no point to living this life.

JD

 

[Redoubtable]

I agree with you on this matter, Jdawg, and this is why I'm skeptical . . .

 

[gendanken]

Moment:

Was there a purpose for doing this,or was this just another strange and mysterious way?
Very serious and curious about this.

No purpose other than god being a selfish hellion manic about getting his crib defiled by his own selfish hellions: us.

So he monkeyed with our language aiming put a wedge in communication and stop the building altogether. Heed to Redoubtable, momenutum- it seems the only ways for authority to stay grounded is through petty games, pain, and purgatory.

 

[everneo]

Originally posted by Redoubtable
I agree with you on this matter, Jdawg, and this is why I'm skeptical . . .

If you believe in free will of a human then his future cannot be a fully predestined one. Future of that individual is to be decided by God based on his actions out of his free will. The omniscience of God is restricted by God Himself with respect to the free will of humans. BTW, omniscience has no meaning as for as future is concerned.

 

[Jenyar]

The Tower of Babel was a towering rebellion against God's authority and laws. His laws were supposed to be their morals. Have a look at a traditional Jewish perspective on the event:

"Come, let us build us a city and a tower." Many, many years were spent building the tower. It reached so great a height that it took a year to mount to the top. A brick was, therefore, more precious in the sight of the builders than a human being. If a man fell down and met his death, none took notice of it; but if a brick dropped, they wept, because it would take a year to replace it. So intent were they upon accomplishing their purpose that they would not permit a woman to interrupt her work of brickmaking when the hour of travail came upon her. Moulding bricks, she gave birth to her child, and tying it round her body in a sheet, she went on moulding bricks.
-- Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews

The Babel story makes one thing clear: people build with words. They were erecting a pièce de résistance - a monument of their own success and arrogance - of their independence from God. What God wanted was a universal language would promote peace, not rebellion. In stead of building a structure towards heaven at the cost of humanity, God confused their language so that we would have to build up our unity - our common humanity, using the bricks and mortar that He provided.

You can still see it: when we focus on our differences, we build walls and create separation, where we focus on our unity (despite our physical or linguistic differences), we promote love - not love based on our individual achievement, but of our common achievement.

In stead of language being the universal language, love (and perhaps music ) must be our universal language(s). Abstract buildings in stead of physical ones. When we can see our success we often become slave to it - it becomes an idol before God.

What are the highest morals, the noblest values? The universal ones, like peace. Those are the monuments we must build. As a result of Babel we won't ever be able to take love, mutual understanding or success for granted. We have to work at it.

 

[Xev]

Jenyar:

What are the highest morals, the noblest values?

Answering this question requires a valuation itself. For me?
Freedom, artistry, nobility and power. For you, faith, hope and charity. Peace.
In this war of memes that the world has become, neither of us can can claim a real, objective argument for the supremacy of our values. Language, it seems, is a most potent weapon.

Redoubtable:

Any being, be he divinity or man, must eventually, to maintain his authority, cause hurt to his subjects.

Which proves the bankrupcy of authority as traditionally concieved. The authority ends like Doestoevski's Grand Inquisitor, condemned to make slaves of men. Anything else would, ultimately, lead to the subversion of that authority.

I daresay this is the ultimate virtue of democracy - authority is recognized as something that should be subverted.

 

[Jenyar]

PS. For those who might be fooled: Redoubtable is not a Christian. His "God must cause hurt to rule" is not Biblical.

PPS. As everneo said: knowing the future is not the same as deciding the future. We decide our actions. We make our own decisions, God makes His. The future is a mixture of the results of these decisions, and their consequences. The results lie in the future, but their consequences lie in God's hands. We can only foresee the seen, but God forsees the unforseseen and the unseen.

 

[Jenyar]

Originally posted by Xev

Answering this question requires a valuation itself. For me?
Freedom, artistry, nobility and power. For you, faith, hope and charity. Peace.
In this war of memes that the world has become, neither of us can can claim a real, objective argument for the supremacy of our values. Language, it seems, is a most potent weapon.

Morals by their very nature require valuation. I do not suggest otherwise - that is why there can be no self-evident, "natural" morality. A moral view of authority is one that questions it. People who don't believe in decisions or consequences, are invariably ones that do not benefit from them, or want others to benefit from such standards.

"Neither of us"? That is pre-Babel, if you read my exposition - I suggest both of us should establish such a set of "memes", however artificial you might deem it to be. Freedom and peace seem to be available only artificially, and I will explain why.

You say freedom, artistry, nobility and power? I see your offer, and I raise you: Faith, hope, charity... peace. Freedom of faith, artistry without prejudice, freedom of speech, nobility of character, and hope that all these might endure. Power to maintain peace.

Who said freedom and peace are the highest aspirations? They are because they make all other virues possible. It's a natural inclination, but it necessary opposes other natural tendencies: the tendency of selfishness, arrogance, hypocrisy, lies, crime... the destruction of the pillars of peace.

For it is a structure that has to be held up by other structures. Peace is a construction, an imposing of order against the natural backdrop of chaos - the same chaos out of which lawlessness is formed, out of which organized crime, crimes of passion, and every conceivable form of evil is justified.

Light is not the absence of darkness, it is foreign to darkness. Order is not a natural state, but it is a natural goal. Some things cause people to miss that goal. The ancient Hebrew word for missing one's intended goal, or "wandering from the path of right and duty", is chatah', sin.

I daresay this is the ultimate virtue of democracy - authority is recognized as something that should be subverted.

Subversion is by definition "against authority". You must qualify: subversion to what ends? By its own, subversion at all costs are nothing but chaos and destructive nihilism. The "ideal" that there is no authority also suggests the ideal that there can be no subversion, no anarchy. Just pure chaos. Very human... Interesting that you describe it as an "ultimate virtue of democracy", as if subversion it is made possible in its most practical form through democracy.

You have to ask: which is the greatest - the freedom, or the conditions that make it possible?

Authority should of course always be questioned - re-evaluated and tested - and where it is possible to change it, it should be changed for the better.

It is that "for the better" that begs the question 'what is better', and that is where morality, justice, laws, values, etc. are agreed upon, established, and enforced. Both criminals and moral people might question the justice system. Morality would just place them on different sides of the question - their intentions. There is a German proverb that says "the intention is the soul of the act".Justice cannot judge intentions, but God can. That is part of what makes "Biblical morality" so controversial. But I digress...

Freedom is a very weak force. It has to be protected by stronger forces - but at the same time, if freedom is supposed to be pure, those forces must hold to purity themselves. If freedom is supposed to be structured, then those forces have to be structured as well.

I just don't see how chaos can protect a freedom of chaotic nature...

 

[Greco]

Originally posted by moementum7
Was there a purpose for doing this,or was this just another strange and mysterious way?
Very serious and curious about this.
Thanks.

The tower of babel was a way for ancient man to explain different languages. It was a dillema for them. Why so many different languages when all were discendents of adam. So they contrived this story to explain why so many languages existed. They also presented it as a punishment from God, a little jewish trick to show they were the chosen ones, since they still spoke the original God/adam language.

This Babel event also raises the questions:

How many people worked on the project?
How many languages were created?
Are all latin languages derived from Babel?
Why are some language related and others arent?
Were all languages supplied with the same vocabullary?
Did family members speak a different language?
Were they able to write that language?



This event shows once again the utter stupidityand ineptness that ancient man attributed to their God. If there's a God out there he's having a good laugh with our primitive thinking.

 

[Jenyar]

This event shows once again the utter stupidity and ineptness that ancient man attributed to their God. If there's a God out there he's having a good laugh with our primitive thinking.

This statement shows your utter lack of understanding and prejudice. Yes, it is ancient history. No, it is not useless information.

They also presented it as a punishment from God, a little jewish trick to show they were the chosen ones, since they still spoke the original God/adam language.

Um, Babel was before Abraham, who is the father of the religion. Abraham might have spoken Hebrew, but that does not mean everybody before him did. Noah's son Shem was 100 two years after the flood, and reportedly lived to be 500. There was plenty of time to learn a new language. His descendants moved to Ur, where Abraham was born.

How many people worked on the project? Who knows? Why is this important? All the people who were left after the flood worked on it. Probably not that many, if it was soon after.
How many languages were created? Again, who knows. Remember: written language is not the same as spoken language. Keep in mind, that for people used to one language, it wouldn't take much difference to confuse them. If only the word for axe changed enough to sound similar to brick, that would already put a spanner in the works.
Are all latin languages derived from Babel? Why Latin? Because you have a western bias? We don't know how close the account dates to the event. How many languages were there in Sumerian times? Here's a useful chart to illustrate families of language.
Why are some language related and others arent? Some people were related and others weren't. Some groups worked together and others didn't. Some people spoke one language and other people spoke others. See linguistics.
Were all languages supplied with the same vocabullary? Probably a derived vocabulary of some sort.
Did family members speak a different language? If they kept together, maybe... if they were apart, nothing keeps them from speaking different languages.
Were they able to write that language? No. Language first, writing second. But different languages can be written with the same symbols. After all, symbols only represented meaning, not pronunciation. Maybe they started writing in order to convey meanings.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CW_Arnhem/frgen11.html

 

[Redoubtable]

Originally posted by everneo
If you believe in free will of a human then his future cannot be a fully predestined one. Future of that individual is to be decided by God based on his actions out of his free will. The omniscience of God is restricted by God Himself with respect to the free will of humans. BTW, omniscience has no meaning as for as future is concerned.

I personally believe that there is a finite quantity of matter and energy in the universe, and modern science seems to agree with me. This implies that there is a finite number of arrangements into which this matter and energy can be formed. Though astronomically numerous, the possibilities of the cosmos are, nevertheless, limited. A certain, definite number of a events, or series of events can occur.

God, in order to be eternal, would be indestructible and unwavering. He would also be omniscient. With these qualities, He would survey the interminable story of the universe, and know it intimately.
This criterion of godliness demands that He would be fully aware of all the aforementioned events and series of events.
If He is eternal, He does not, as we do, look down the immeasurable line of time, stretching back to the remote and unplummed past, and forward into an enigma. He simply knows all the possibilities and all the possibilities which will spring from preceding possbilities.
To Him, there would no past, no present, no future, but a grand collection of feasible patterns.

God's eternality and omniscience require that he know the future. You see, he simply can't not know it.

Pursuantly, God, a Being who cannot not know the consequncces of a certain of event, created Adam and, later, Eve. He designed them while fully aware of their intrinsic shortcomings and the troubles this would cause the Earth. He knew these things, and made Man and Woman accordingly.

If God is Omniscient of the Universe and absolutely Eternal, there is no way we could have free will.

 

[Greco]

[[/url] [/B][/QUOTE]

Noah's son Shem was 100 two years after the flood, and reportedly lived to be 500. There was plenty of time to learn a new language. His descendants moved to Ur, where Abraham was born.

"There was plenty of time to learn a new language" Why?
What need was there for a new language for Noah,shem and others. It would have more sense for god to maintain a single language to simplify communications.

Different languages develop from group isolation. Devide any group and give them enough time isolated and they will develop another language. It is that simple, no need for myths to explain language differences.

Also, theists believe in free will,meaning god doesnt intefere but then why does he intefere and confuse everybody with creating hundreds if not thousands of languages. Like life wasnt tough enough as it were. Once again I repeat that man has made god into a meddlesome, senile, vengeful,inconsistant and sadistic god.
He could have taken his time and come up with something better.

 

[Jenyar]

Redoubtable

Your argument starts out well enough:

If He is eternal, He does not, as we do, look down the immeasurable line of time, stretching back to the remote and unplummed past, and forward into an enigma. He simply knows all the possibilities and all the possibilities which will spring from preceding possbilities. To Him, there would no past, no present, no future, but a grand collection of feasible patterns.

But I don't agree with your conclusion as the only logical possibility:

Pursuantly, God, a Being who cannot not know the consequncces of a certain of event, created Adam and, later, Eve. He designed them while fully aware of their intrinsic shortcomings and the troubles this would cause the Earth. He knew these things, and made Man and Woman accordingly.

What if God was creating a random variable within this limited time frame. Our very concept of free will is limited. In theory you can do whatever you want, but in practice, you can only do what you are able to do. God created us with free will, but this does not mean we are eternally free. We are surrounded by a few things which form the boundaries of our "freedom": birth and death, on the one hand, and physical and mental boundaries on the other. Those are our X and Y axis. We are two dimensional creations within a three dimensional world (to simplify it). We can be completely free within our own world, yet completely dependent on God's world at the same time.

The whole of God's creation is self-contained, a closed system, but it might be part of a greater creation - on a Z axis, going somewhere in either direction. Free will contained within God's will.

If God is Omniscient of the Universe and absolutely Eternal, there is no way we could have free will.

There is no way we can have ultimate freedom without God making it possible. As it is, our freedom - our very reality - is limited to what we can imagine (for some, it is even limited only to what scientists can verify). The freedom with which God has created us, is becoming less and less. That is not to say that God did not know what He was doing - it just means that He did it anyway.

 

[Jenyar]

Greco

Different languages develop from group isolation. Devide any group and give them enough time isolated and they will develop another language. It is that simple, no need for myths to explain language differences.

The myth wasn't really intended to explain language differences. It points out a certain direction that life took, with God in perspective.

If you read the previous chapter (Genesis 10), you get a parallel picture - by "group and isolation" as you said:

4 The sons of Javan:
Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittim and the Rodanim. 5 (From these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with its own language.)
...
20 These are the sons of Ham by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.
...
31 These are the sons of Shem by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.
...
32 These are the clans of Noah's sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.

It's hard to figure out the proposed chronology, since nowhere it says how long after the flood the tower was supposedly built. It was probably similar to the Sumerian ziggurats built in Babilon, the domain of the "Hammites", see also The Tower of Babel: An archaelogically informed reinterpretation

Do some research about why the ziggurats were built, you might be surprised at the relevance of this story.

Also, theists believe in free will, meaning god doesnt intefere but then why does he intefere and confuse everybody with creating hundreds if not thousands of languages. Like life wasnt tough enough as it were. Once again I repeat that man has made god into a meddlesome, senile, vengeful,inconsistant and sadistic god. He could have taken his time and come up with something better.

Read my post to Redoubtable. Free will doesn't mean God can't or doesn't interfere. It means that the nature of His interference points what we call "natural" into a certain direction. Our world - God's creation - turns on God's moral axis, and our seasons change accordingly.

That is why we can call an Ice Age for example, "God's will", "the course of nature" and "inhumane" at the same time, depending on what you are trying to prove. But the description makes no difference to the reality. What happened at "babel" is no different.

God did come up with something better. He is just giving us a chance to decide whether we want it or not. What we sometimes call heaven and hell are no different places that life or death. They're "natural".