From Dwight at A Religious Liberal Blog:
This was a quote I gleamed off of Fr Jake’s site. It identifies a problem with the drive to conformity that the right seeks. “Any insistence to agree on everything sounds like a call to build a new “Tower of Babel.”
In the story, unity of language and purpose led to pride, with the people patting themselves on the back for being so smart. (So) God decided to destroy the tower and to confuse our language in order to keep us mindful that only God creates anything of lasting significance.
Differences remind us that God alone is sovereign – not you, me, theologians or doctrines. Divergent ideas and actions, even heretical ones, will not destroy us, our faith, or Our Lord. But they will lead us to ask more questions, find new answers, correct old errors…”
It sounds nice, but this description of Gen 11:1-8 is really way off base.
God told the people to trust Him and scatter across the Earth (be fruitful and multiply). Instead, they wanted a great city with a monument to so they could stay in one place and be known as a great people, etc. There was nothing wrong with having a common language, per se:
God confused their language so they could not cooperate and would continue as He had commanded (scatter). Using the logic of the author’s quote, the “diversity” of multiple languages is as much a reminder of our sinful nature as it is anything. I believe there are better lessons to be learned from this passage, but in this case the author appears to be reading into (eisegesis) rather than extrapolating from (exegesis).
Life itself is a lesson in diversity, but Geneis 11:1-8 really isn’t.
This kind of story and rationale is the reason why I don’t find religion at all convincing.
In my opinion this is a continuation of the creation story of Genesis and is not to be taken any more literally than is the talking snake in the garden of Eden. This story served to explain why the Hebrew people did not speak the same language or have the same culture as other tribes around them. That was its primary purpose.
Naturally, such a story needs a moral and must be viewed as God’s reaction to man’s flaws. In this case it was man’s working cooperatively without deferring to God. As far as morality tales go, this one is fairly tame. No great immoralities are listed nor is any great punishment meted.
It may also have been a result of observing the ruins of vast building projects. I saw a History Channel program on what they thought was the basis of the Babel myth but I don’t recall where or what culture.
Of course, certain evangelicals or fundamentalists will feel the need to believe that this story is literal and that God came down (apparantly with some others if you take “come let us go down” literally) and changed people’s language so they would scatter. I always marvel that some folks would rather hold to a literal belief in the stories in Genesis than to see the beauty and truth in the allegories.
Timothy, I think the only way one can be a reputable Christian is to recognize that it (the bible) simply can’t be taken as inerrantly literal.