The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Why Me? The Babel Constant

10 February 2010

Volume 12, Issue 6

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Myth: a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, typically involving supernatural beings or events.

Following along different myth paths, from either the creation of all life from God’s will, or the evolution of some human life out of the trees of Africa a few billion years ago, things are getting more interesting. Since time is of the essence however, we will let our readers do their own evolutionary trip and only make a short comment about monkeys to men.

Does it seem only a coincidence that these most ancient human ancestors are found in Africa, which today we still consider the most primitive place on earth when it comes to just about anything? Actually it seems as the most evolutionarily logical place to look, considering that there are more monkeys in Africa than anyplace else. But that still doesn’t answer the fundamental question of the leap of faith in intelligence and that little thing – language. That was just a minor evolutionary leap of faith from squeaks, screams, and howls to the iPad. No wonder we need a lot of time. Of course only in the twenty-first century would all this evolving technology seem like a true advancement rather than a waste of precious time.

So when we last left Adam and Eve, they were sinners in the Garden of Eden. The short synopsis of the events thereafter is that the Creator made clothing for the couple, therein creating a covenant of God’s grace, today, in its true essence, the grace most rare substance on earth.

Then God kicked the couple out of the Garden so that they would not become immortal. They had kids and more kids, and just like today their kids were more self-centered than their parents. Since we know little of those days, we must assume that it had little to do with their music or their lack of a work ethic. Those things after all take a long time to evolve, or just plain develop. Perhaps a rebel without a cause really is just an unconscious effort to become something new and unique from our parent’s influence?

These kids got so bad that the mean and angry God decided to start over, so he had the dude named Noah build an arc out of wood, with the help of his reluctant offspring. They got on the ship with two of each kind of animals and it started to rain. During that episode of a little over a month, the vapor canopy that made the earth an Eden, collapsed, waters also came out of the depths of the earth. That was some climate change you could believe in, except for the reality that unless you were on that little life raft, along with all other terrestrial life on earth, you became today’s motor fuel.

In the process of making all that crude oil, so as not to completely recreate the human experiment all over again, after the flood the bottoms of oceans rose rapidly, a lot of that mud ran back into the sea, leaving all sorts of amazing features such as grand canyons, graceful arches, and natural features so breathtaking that it would need a whole section of North America to display the power of these miracles. So today we can even see this, if we travel from sea level in the Gulf of Mexico up to say the volcano land of Yellowstone National Park, at about eight thousand feet. That is a real trip of just two thousand miles, with a few side excursions to see some of that truly miraculous scenery. Truthfully the only way you can believe that this happened over billions of years, is just to close off your mind entirely to the existence of God.

The existence of God, that is really what the Bible myth is all about; so back to Noah after the flood. The whole human experiment began over again. The Bible says that Noah’s ship came to rest on Mount Ararat, which is the present country of Turkey. Some have said that the ship actually exists, buried in a glacier up on the mountain, but we would never really want to find out if it exists for real, for that would make all the evolutionary hocus pocus, be just that. So just to continue to go our own way without God, we will just continue to babble about how we are getting better and better all the time.

This brings us to human noise in the extreme, what the Bible calls the Tower of Babel experience. This occurred not all that long after the end of the Genesis Flood. All the kids the sons of Noah begat after the flood settled down on the plains and decided that it was a great place to call home. Cities are like that, they have all that human culture, they are great places to live, and outside the city is really wilderness, with all types of scary things and weird creatures. If we spend too much time out in that forbidden land, who knows it might just scare the hell out of us. We really would not want that to happen, after all that is so – primitive, and we all need to stick together so that we can reinforce our evolving goodness of elitism.

In the Biblical Tower of Babel myth we discover, something we find so mystifying that we can’t at all understand what it meant. Why on God’s green earth would we want to speak different languages? God knows, even we Yanks can’t speak the Queen’s English, and English itself is so imprecise that just about anyone can make up a word, and in our world in a brief instance everyone around the world will know what we are talking about. At least that is true for those of us who have elitist access to all the modern conveniences of a prosperous lifestyle and education.

Since we used such a word a short time ago, we will use the example of an iPad. As with all of the recent Apple computer creations notice the “i” subservient to the technology, so as to show that owning an “iSomething” really is what makes “youSomeone.” This is of course marketing genius, but it is not unique in human history, because in the Tower of Babel Biblical discourse we find the “iTower” which is really, in its cohesive community, “The WeTower.”

The really great thing about a uniform evolutionary history of millions and billions of years is it takes away our accountability and our responsibility for anything and everything that happens today. Then we can redefine what most primitive good people consider bad, for we know that evil really doesn’t exist, so we will call it by some more politically correct term or terms. If we call “terrorism” something like “man caused disasters” they will go away, or at least become part of the wild universe, where we are too scared to venture, for we the highly evolved, are scared to death of the unknown.

Just as in the whole Biblical creation account, we, created in the image of God, know that God used words as his informational construct for creating, building, and eventually recreating the world. Hence if we use words properly, we can create a new world order, out of the chaos of language. This assumes ultimately that our babel can become Babel. Of course this only works in a universe where God, if he exists at all, is here to do our bidding, so that we can create a world in our image, for the good of everyone, if they only will believe and follow our example.

Let us digress for a moment. Much is said about the teleprompter use of the President of the United States. As a highly trained lawyer, he like no other leader in perhaps the world today, understands that words have meaning. Not only do words have meaning, the punctuation of the words, in the string of words we call sentences, which develop into paragraphs, which become articles, books and speeches, have meaning also. This view of reality was also reinforced in the church he attended for twenty years. The (black) liberation theology that was preached by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is a process by which the use of words is used to elevate persons of color, to equality amongst all of God’s people.

What is lost in all human babel is that our words do not create anything at all, they only reflect the reality of God’s creation, and if God did or doesn’t create that reality, our words, are just words no matter the language we use, within the diversity of human language, but also within each language. We are not God and hence only God creates ex nihilo. Those ex nihilo creation words create Godly complex mathematical equations by which the world operates. Actually the math is really just a humanly created symbolic language used to describe natural laws, again that humans can only model, they cannot even begin to understand except in truly spiritual, allegorical, or mythological means.

So back early in Genesis Chapter 11 we see the story of the Tower of Babel. In the Authorized, or King James Version it includes just 9 verses and a total of 235 words, with no paragraphs. Since this is the English language version of the Bible that the Apostle Paul used, we see that mixing up languages is no big deal to God. The major function of all this babel was to get people to move to other areas of the earth and develop a diversity of character more reflective of God himself, rather than mono-ethnic human desires. Through this whole language babel we learned not to trust one another, not because we humans really had changed at all, it was just that we always fear, not so much reality, but we have trouble expressing our fear in words, which is the basis for all of our world’s tribes and nations.

The myth of a created universal history of thousands rather than millions and billions of years presented in the Bible continues through a garden, a universal flood, and civilization growing again to a Tower of Babel, forcing humans to migrate around the world. This must make that babbling experiment not all that long ago, and as a consequence something real in this world in which we live. Furthermore perhaps the complexity of the land itself in some miraculous, mysterious, or mythical way contributes to the creation of language and the formation of the cultures they maintain, which we are working so diligently to eradicate, with so little success, but that is another mythical path.

When you look at the formation of the United States form of republican government, for the most part it still remains distinctly unique. Then when you realize that the wealth of America came from the fertility of the land, the diversity of her immigrants, and the unity of her language, it illustrates really the grace of God that flows to those who attempt to live according, not in accordance with God’s Law, but the power of God’s grace. The founding documents of the United States of America attempt to create a nation “under God.” That God, is not pagan gods, Allah the god of Islam, the forces of the universe, or gods of human material fabrication.

Inalienable rights are what the Founders sought to codify in words, succinctly the understanding that each human being is truly unique from one another, yet is still uniquely unified in our humanity. That unity in diversity is the best description for the Christian Triune Godhead. That unity in diversity came forth in a Constitution that recognized that not all Christians, were Calvinists, some were Baptists. God only knows why, but some of the Baptists were also Calvinists and some were not.

Some people were not Christians at all, and even others were Agnostic, some Atheistic, and some worshiped themselves, and others worshipped money and–or power. All had been given the freedom to worship in their own religion, for even those who claimed no formal religion believed in humanity. Some thought it was acceptable to treat other humans as slaves; that struggle took on Civil War ramifications, but through it all, the grace of God prevailed, and the United States of America became the most truly successful nation in human history. This occurred not because of anything other than the grace of God, which very diverse revolutionaries tried to put into words and did a miraculously good job codifying that reality.

This current Great Recession, in this country and as it has been exported around the world is really the result of a bunch of babblers attempting to create another Tower of Babel in which we can live without God and truly moral humanity. It didn’t work back thousands of years ago, it won’t work today, but just as in that mythical real Babel, the people at work to build this new Babylon, are unwilling to learn from the reality of this myth of history – or even accept it as an allegory.

So to use uncommon words from ancient civilizations to describe the world in which we live and we Americans are the exporting leaders, through our spin of our myths, we are the greatest solipsistic sophists of history. Truly we currently seem to have no desire substantially to change our ways, no matter how stupid our babel becomes.

Next week we jump through thousands of years from Genesis and the Bible to The Reformation, to begin to put some context into the world in which we no longer like the game and can’t exculpate our seat at the table.