About the tower of Babel...

"I've got a favorite story
About the tower of Babel
Some say its true
And some say its a fable"
- Frank Black, "Old Black Dawning"

Just a quick post on an idea I had last night. The tower of Babel continues to be built today, and our ability to communicate with each other continues to degrade. The more we know, the more we "reach for the heavens" in science and technology, the more we seem not able to talk to each other, the more fractious and dangerous and hateful the world gets.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

- Genesis 11:1-9