"We will build towers to the heavens." "Man was not built for such a height."

by sd-7 9 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  sd-7

  This topic has almost certainly been discussed before, but it just popped into my head. The title for this topic is a quote from a brilliant rock band called The Protomen--for you video-gamers out there, if you've never heard of them, you should give 'em a listen on iTunes or wherever. They're incredible.

  On to the topic. Genesis recounts a story of the Tower of Babel. If you're here, I'm sure you know what happened there--God sent an angel to confuse the language of man, thus preventing them from finishing the tower. Thus the origin of man's many languages, right?

  Certainly some of you don't believe that story happened, and to each his own on that. This thought popped into my head, however. God saw mankind united on a project. He then reasons, look--they've got one language and now they're building this great tower. If they keep this up, nothing will be impossible for them. So let me go down and confuse their languages. Right? Okay. Two issues come up, now that WT indoctrination is not the guiding force for my thoughts:

  1. According to the Bible, God himself recognized that humanity, if united, could accomplish ANYTHING. (This begs the question of why the Society insists on demeaning human accomplishments to no end [see Wonders of Creation DVD]--but we already know the answer. It's just a means of introducing the carrot of the Kingdom to the disillusioned.)

  2. God himself, then, is responsible for man's inability to unite. He saw man's unity, and saw fit to disrupt it himself! What does that say about God, that he would do that?

  In pondering this, the implications are troubling to my cult personality. ... The Society consistently teaches that God allowed Adam and Eve and Satan to continue to exist in order to prove that man alone could never successfully rule himself. Then, when man unites and begins an unprecedented construction project, God personally intervenes to disrupt it. Is it possible, then, that God was afraid to be proven wrong? If indeed, his motive was what the Society claims it was, then why did he feel a need to interfere? If man could not rule himself, then why was there a need for God to get involved? Would not this project have failed on its own, thus proving him right?

  At the very least, it indicates to me that the issue of sovereignty is an invention of the Society and was probably not on God's mind nearly that much. At worst, it indicates that God's m.o. is identical to the Society's m.o.--he acts for one reason and one reason alone: to maintain authority. Not out of love, or out of 'zeal for his name', or anything else. Just like men, he just wants to stay in power. So he would take anything and everything from man in order to keep him dependent on divine rulership. Is this what a God of justice would do? Intentionally frame mankind in order to bias the results of the test of who has the right to rule?

  This may be familiar ground for you, but the more I'm away from the Watchtower's influence, the more little thoughts like this keep coming up. I want to believe in God as my heavenly Father, as the loving Father that Jesus showed to us in his time on earth. I want to have that faith. But it is difficult when faced constantly with only a religion that misrepresents him as authoritarian and cruel, unrelenting and unreasonable, only out to punish and nit-pick.

  Any thoughts you have on this will be welcome, no matter how much sacrilege you commit in the process...(sigh) I really have become a monster, after all...

  SD-7
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  megs

  You have not "become a monster", and the very fact that you would even think such a thing shows the extent that the WT indoctrinates its followers... Human nature is to question...

  If there is a God, I have a hard time accepting that he/she/it is as the Bible portrays. This creature is not the personification of goodness, it is petty and unforgiving.
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  Leolaia

  sd-7.....Excellent post!!! I think you've made a very good observation that the Society's answer to the theodicy question (invented indeed by Rutherford, who drew on his lawyer background to picture the sovereignty issue as a heavenly court case) does not adequately account for what is related in the OT. I would imagine that some would say on an ad hoc basis that God intervened because the builders were wicked idolators or some such thing, but this still does not address the Society's claim that God has patiently waited for humans to develop a workable government and technology to bring peace and prosperity before intervening into world affairs.

  Most biblical approaches to the problem of theodicy fail in part because the Bible contains so many theological portraits of God and interpretations of justice that are difficult to press into a single, simple doctrine. This is only natural since the volume is a compilation of religious writings spanning at least nine centuries. The Eden, Flood, and Babel stories in the primeval history of J has a God that keeps the progress of man in check and each of these stories have parallels in Mesopotamian mythology, which construes mankind as created simply to be laborers for the gods (cf. Genesis 2:15), and Enki was the god who kept humans from attaining immortality (by telling Adapa to not eat from the food of life, which he claimed was really the food of death) and who brought contention and disunity to mankind by estranging the tongues in their mouths — making them speak different languages. But Enki also gave humans (divine) knowledge and also saved mankind from the Flood that another god, Enlil, was bringing because humans were becoming too noisy. And alongside Enki was the god Anu who was the one who freely offered immortality to Adapa. The original myths in their polytheistic form (compare also the Greek myth of Prometheus) had a complexity of interaction in the divine sphere that is missing in the biblical narratives, which collapse many of these different divine characters into a single God responsible for all divine actions in the primeval history. This may be one reason why God seems inconsistent or malevolent (as the later gnostics surmised), but it also gives theology more material to work with as it projects much of that complexity within God. In the Mesopotamian Flood myth, one god destroys while the other saves, whereas the Hebrew version has one God doing both.
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  PSacramento

  It makes one wonder if the OT God is the same as the NT God....
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  glenster

  The Bible doesn't intend an all beneficent God (or all beneficent people), not
  that He uses His prerogative the most extremely in this one. He reacts to human
  pride (not that He thought there was no limit to what people could do). They
  could still have united, learned each other's languages, and continued, but He
  showed the folly of human pride in that by merely assigning them different cul-
  tures, they became 'centric about their groups (still a problem too often to-
  day) so didn't continue together and accomplish more. It might be taken figura-
  tively for the origin of various cultures (and a warning against being too 'cen-
  tric and prideful in a way that divides people over unimportant differences).
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_babel
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  Blue Grass

  SD God God wasn't against mankind being united, he was against what they were uniting to do. God united the descendent's of Jacob under with one language, one law, and gave them their own land. And in the new testament God united Jews and Gentiles under Christ. And of course after the resurrection all of heaven and earth will be united. So to conclude God doesn't want people to unite based on what happened with the tower of Babel is fallacy.
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  sd-7

  Blue Grass -- to conclude that what I just said was a fallacy is a fallacy. You must understand the perspective I'm looking at this from. I agree with you, that in the overall Biblical theme, God does want people to unite. That's not the issue I'm addressing, per se; I didn't intend to make it seem otherwise, and if I did, my mistake. The issue I'm addressing, ultimately, is how this contradicts the Watchtower doctrine regarding sovereignty. I am saying that God's involvement at the Tower of Babel should have been unnecessary if the point of his allowing suffering was to prove that man could not rule successfully without him.

  Obviously, God wanted man to unite--but under his rule, right? Right. The problem I see here is that he saw man uniting without him, and decided he couldn't allow it. The issue here is that the unity God prefers is apparently only unity that he permits, and the implications of that. Thanks.

  SD-7
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  Leolaia

  Blue Grass....I understand where you're coming from and that argument makes sense as long as one assumes that there is a single portrait of God in the Bible; I find that perspective questionable and I would rather take the story on its own terms rather than harmonize it with other later portraits of God. This is important because unlike certain later views of God as a uniter, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that God wants mankind disunited within the context of this story. God's decision to intervene in human affairs in 11:7 follows his reflection on the situation in v. 6. The decision to intervene is made not so much against the work of the people in this specific instance (the building of the tower); if that were the case, he simply could have destroyed the tower or brought disaster to the city. What Yahweh seeks in the story is something far more permanent and lasting. The intervention is specifically oriented to what man may be expected to accomplish in the future ("this is only the beginning of what they will do"...."nothing will be impossible for them"), and the action that Yahweh takes is seen as permanently dividing humankind along linguistic and national lines. Within the context of the story, God very much doesn't want people to be united.

  The reason for this is explained in the statement that "nothing they purpose to do will be thwarted for them" (l'-ybtsr m-hm kl 'shr yzmw l-`shwt) if the peoples remain united (v. 6). This statement echoes the phraseology of praises directed to God, e.g. Job 42:2 "I know that you can do all things, no purpose of yours can be thwarted" (kl twkl w l'-ybtsr m-mk mzmh). In short, what God is recognizing here is that mankind has the ability to become like God, precisely the same issue at the heart of the Eden narrative in Genesis 3:5. This confirms that what God is responding to here is the ambition of the people, as made explicit in 11:4, and this ambition is a fundamental part of human nature (the same ambition manifested by the first couple who eat from the Tree of Knowledge to gain divine wisdom). So God imposes a limitation on man by eliminating the unity of language; this act creates divisions along linguistic, tribal, and national lines (as ch. 10 delineates, with wars and political conflicts a natural consequence of such divisions of course) and introduces confusion where they had once been unity in purpose. This makes the story, as sd-7 recognizes, quite relevant to the Society's sovereignty doctrine which supposes that God has allowed wickedness to give mankind enough time to learn how to govern themselves peacefully without God's direct rule. The story however recognizes that without limitation, man has the same ability God has in doing whatever they purpose to do. God therefore imposes limitation to put mankind in its proper place in subjection to him (which happens to be the same theme found in Job), precisely the opposite thing that the Society claims that God has done. And this limitation is the very thing that is the basis of man's inability to self-govern peacefully. One could then say, from the point of view of the sovereignty doctrine, that God has stacked the deck against mankind in advance, ensuring that mankind will fail. That makes the past several thousand years of suffering seem quite pointless in comparison.
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  sinis

  Ever wonder why the name of the tower means "Gate of the God"? Did man REALLY think they could build a tower to the heavens? Shit, building on a mountain in the area would have started them off a lot higher. Ever wonder why...
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  nykid

  I think apart from the Flood story this is the most unbelievable story in the Bible. But, just like the Flood story the Tower of Babel story was borrowed from other mythology.