The Tower of Babel - Languages: Isn't this story unhinged? (page 3)

cantleave

I hear the building of The Shard in London has made god very angry. He is threatening to populate the city with world class athletes, many of whom speak different languages, as a punishment!

N.drew

I agree OldGenerationDude with this;

The story of the Tower of Babel is written in the format of a humorous anecdote.

It came after knowledge of a global flood. So the building may have been planned to reach higher than the flood plane. And that is funny. How many people might fit on the top of that? And who?

blondie

That's right up there with a talking snake and how nonchalantly Eve talked to it.

Eve and the snake fed into the parable about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. As I recall, Adam and Eve's minds were like children and they were unable to think critically. After eating the "fruit", they lost their innocence and began noticing that they were naked and hid in shame from God.

james_woods

Eve and the snake fed into the parable about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. As I recall, Adam and Eve's minds were like children and they were unable to think critically. After eating the "fruit", they lost their innocence and began noticing that they were naked and hid in shame from God.

In this story also - God is pictured as an enemy of natural human progress.

botchtowersociety

Babel.

Bab=gate

El=God.

BTS

steve2

It almost makes this god-image look like a kid stirring up an ant-hill just for the heck of it.

In the 19th century Emile Durkheim, perhaps the first ever sociologist, was one of the first to note a strong correlation between the stage of a group's historical development and their conception of "god".

Durkheim stated that "men" make their "gods" in their own image and - more interestingly - that "the divine" is nothing more than the power of the group/society/race reflected back upon itself. It is not so much that people fear "god" but fear what the powers in society can do to them through human laws and rules. Durkheim had a deep interest in religion and its impact on people's beliefs about what was "real" and "true" in the physical world.

notjustyet

And remember that God wanted to prove to Man that he could not rule himself successfully so he decided to let Man give it a run to prove a point. We know that he could have started over with a new pair of Humans but the Angels were looking down and they would also wonder "Could Man have ruled himself successfully?"

So God let's Adam and Eve make a go at it and then when he sees that they may actually be progressing he decides to tamper with the experiment and throws a monkey wrench into it and derails man from progressing.

Now tell me how this is allowing man to rule himself?

Does not compute,..

OldGenerationDude

This account would only reach the conclusions that James_Woods claims (i.e., God is jealous and or fearful of human accomplishment and trying to prevent or limit progress it) if like the Watchtower teaches, the building of the Towel of Babel was in fact a historical account.

Atheists and Judeo-Christian theology both teach that this is not an historical account.

So to come to such a conclusion from reading the story means you neither agree with atheist or mainstream theological views (especially critical theological analysis). It would require you to be stuck with only the Watchtower and other uneducated views as the ones necessary to derail.

If you don't believe in the Bible to begin with, how would you develop a literalist view as developed and championed by Fundamentalists and Adventists? Why would an atheist, especially a self-acclaimed educated and open-minded atheist who claims to use logic, rational thought, and critical thinking adopt a view that would not counter the Judeo-Christian view or be found taught by any serious theology scholar? Why choose a literalist interpretation--the uneducated one, the one used by those who generally demonize the mainstream interpretation from higher education circles? Wouldn't a real atheist or person who has rejected the Bible on the basis of education be familiar with and thus reject the Judeo-Christian view, the one that teaches that this is not an account about human technological advancement or a literal act of God in response? If the Judeo-Christian view is that this is mythological or legendary, how does one account for arguing against the Biblical account by using Watchtower-based definitions?

In other words, doing this is saying: Since the Watchtower view is wrong, then the Bible is wrong.

That's un-rational. To believe that the Bible has to be wrong because the Watchtower failed us is to agree with the Watchtower, that the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses is the One and Only Channel used by the God that the Jews worshipped. In other words, you have arrived at your thinking because you still believe their claim. Why are you trying to counter it? That’s what you’re doing, because you are holding on to the view that this is a literal description of people, progress, and God.

“Since the Watchtower is wrong, and since it could be the only channel of truth and it proved false, therefore the Bible must also be false.” This has to be the logic being used by more than a few on this board because the arguments generally used against the Bible are almost never applicable to mainstream and current theological scholarship.

If one were really trying to show that this story were "unhinged" wouldn't it be better to try to defeat the mainstream and current theological views, ignore the ones taught by the Watchtower (since they don't really represent God or the Bible like they claim)? If we are basing our arguments on "just what we know," then the decisions we make about God and the Bible are just as limited. If our arguments are not aimed or even make reference to the current, traditional, and even critical theological thought because we have not studied them, then we can't say that our arguments based on our limited experience with the Watchtower--a wrong source to begin with--can help us decided one way or the other whether any detail in the Bible is wrong or right.

In fact, trying to do it that way keeps proving the mainstream view of the Tower of Babel account, that we as humans naturally want to judge things our way, according to our "language," to ignore that there is something "higher" than us, and then claim we have replaced the higher source. In reality we have just argued with our limited experience. We built a scarecrow, knocked it down, but in this case the scarecrow is us.

Forget the Watchtower. Unlearn that stuff. These arguments attempting to make the Bible sound unreasonable are not even smart enough to be child's play. They aren't worth the spit out of an unfaithful clergyman's mouth. That's because they come from the GB. Those cronies know NADA about Bible theology and scholarship. They've never stepped into a hall of higher learning--their very shoes wouldn't even been admitted. These arguments presented to try to make this account look “unhinged” just show people up who use them as ignorant and uneducated in Biblical matters and theology.

If you want to prove the story makes no sense, drop these approaches and take a few years to go to a university and get a degree--heck, you don’t even have to do that. Just read the stuff on the Internet (not the stuff that agrees with you or Watchtower stuff) and unlearn these childish arguments.

But really learn it. Reading one or more articles does not an education make. Neither does adopting a conclusion that hasn’t been put to the test by others who do not agree with our conclusion.

I tell you the truth, an educated atheist wouldn't find any of these so-called "good points" enlightening because they have nothing to do with the accepted understanding of this account in the first place.

breakfast of champions

Wasn't god against I.M. Pei's addition of a glass pyramid to the Louvre?

The Tower of Babel - Languages: Isn't this story unhinged?