Monday, July 5, 2010

Reversing The Tower Of Babel




“Turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Genesis, chapter 11,” the voice on the radio said. When it’s a slow night or I’m driving without a passenger, sometimes I turn on talk radio or a religious station, just to hear something different. You never know what you’ll pick up on the AM band, after midnight, as stations fade in and out from leaping frequency’s emanating from who knows where. Tonight I had some radio preacher who was doing a study of the story of the “Tower of Babel.”

“Read with me beginning in verse one, ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.’ Then the writer, who was penning God’s word, that most conservative scholars believe was Moses, said that this mass of humanity that was the earth’s civilization at this time journeyed to the East and settled in the ‘land of Shinar,’ in what is today Iraq. It says that they took burned brick made out of straw and mud to build a city called Babylon, and then erected a tower in the center, that was supposed to reach to heaven. They had plans to become something great and God was going to help them do it. They were erecting a ziggurat, which was an observatory for studying the stars. They figured out the first yearly calendar and began to make astronomical calculations that would have advanced them faster than their philosophical base had support for. Imagine if they had discovered iron and steel and created the internal combustion engine. Before you know it they would be building colonies on the moon, and polluting the solar system with their shallow theology, so in order to slow things down, until a more sophisticated theology and philosophy could be developed over the period of a few millennium through wars, pestilences, famines and other character shaping episodes could create a collective consciousness that is worthy of being controlled by the overmind.”

“So it says that the Lord said, ‘let us go down and ‘confound their language,’ and so He did, along with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. God speaks in the plural, because the Holy Trinity is being established at this early point, because He knows that non believing anti-trinitarians, like those heretics the Jehovah’s Witnesses will try to say that the Bible doesn’t support the trinity. They try to use Tertullian’s treatise on the trinity, from the second century, as the beginning of trinitarianism, but they fail to realize that the Bible was Tertullian’s source for information about the trinity. Just because Tertullian believed that Montanus was the incarnation of the Holy Spirit and followed him out into the desert to wait for Christ’s second coming, where he was massacred by Roman soldiers along with the rest of the heretics, doesn’t mean that his writings are just as crazy as he was.”

“My point is this,” he said and continued, “God created all those different languages to keep people out of communication with each other, but now, the computer reverses that act. How do we deal with this morally? After all what is the brain of a desk top computer called? ‘A tower!’ And what is this tower made of? Plastic, whose early forms was called Bakelite. The bricks that the original tower of Babel was constructed with were burned or baked bricks made out of clay and straw. Now doesn’t baked bricks sound like Bakelite? I believe that in His infinite wisdom, the God of the universe caused the word bake to enter into the vocabulary of both events, for the purpose of linking them together.”

“You can buy computer programs that allow you to translate one language into another, and blog sites like this one offer the opportunity to change the language to any of a number, depending on the readers preference. What will happen when every person on the earth is able to communicate with others and exchange ideas, until our technological advancements give us the capability to create a new universe. Then what do we do? Do we play God, or do we commit suicide. I choose the former, since I believe that God wouldn’t allow us to play God, unless He wanted us to. Maybe we will destroy reality and create hell, but then again we may create heaven, or we may just create a new universe that we can be the God of…

“Number 25, they need 2 vans at the St. Paul Rodeo,” Dotty, the dispatcher said, “and I’m sending you and #37 to pick up 2 parties, that I already have credit cards run for. When you pick them up make a copy of their credit card with your slider and I’ll give you the authorization number. Since neither of us knew how to get to St. Paul Dotty told us to head up Wallace Road, in West Salem, until we saw signs for St. Paul. We did so and after we reached Dayton, #37’s GPS said that we should be on the East side of the river. Then Dotty said that we should have gone up River Road in Keizer on the East side of the river instead. So now we had to drive North to a bridge to cross over, since the Wheatland ferry quit running at 9:00 PM, and it was nearly 2:30 AM. I was running low on gas, so we had to stop and fill up.

By the time that we finally arrived at the fairgrounds the party of Chris, that I was supposed to pick up was still there, but #37’s group was nowhere to be found. So I ran his credit card on the slider and headed back to Salem. They lived in Keizer, and we made it there in 20 minutes. When we were back at the yard vacuuming out our cabs, #37 said that he could choke Dotty for getting us lost, and wasting so much time for nothing, since he would not get paid, since he never found his party.

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