The tower of Babel
The biblical story of the tower of babel is a powerful metaphor to me, symbolizing modern's society's fixation on power, and my own as well. We seek to be as god as we build into the sky.
The biblical story ends with God rejecting humanity's ambition and diverts us by creating thousands of languages so no one could communicate, thus disrupting the cooperation that allowed the tower to be built.
Interestingly our modern world and globalization is perhaps the culmination of humanity's restoration of our "one culture" which allows us to build to the heights of the gods again.
I don't see what God's next move is, in this chess game. I didn't even see the point of God's original move, seeing the tower of babel as ultimately a fantasy, just as I think for all our modern advances we'll just in a new fantasy, fueled by a one time inheritance, without any clear evidence we'll be able to continue the climb much higher.
The ONLY clear success in our "fossil fuel age" is the multiplication of humanity to 6.5 billion, and 9 billion if momentum carries us true.
What could "God's purpose" be in allowing us to multiply so far beyond the carrying capacity of our world? Is He setting up the next major evolutionary step? I certainly except evolution requires a selection process, so whatever else humanity has, we got numbers which can be significantly divided without great harm.
Ah, it is outrageous that the best way to meet the "Step it up" goal of reducing CO2 production by 80% by 2050 is an equivalent drop in population. Maybe the "great plague" is just around the corner. Who's to say who might live or die, or what criteria will decide. We can imagine a game of musical chairs, everyone eyeing their chairs, prepared focused on their goal when the music stops.
I don't know which is more scary, the fact that human population WILL plummet sooner or later by disasters (bad stars) we can't control, OR that we can do it to ourselves intentionally or accidentally. Fear isn't a great teacher perhaps.
We can sing blissfully:
Que Sera Sera,
Whatever will be, will be;
The future's not ours to see
Que Sera Sera,
...
And so for now our tower stands, like every empire, too proud for our own good.
The biblical story ends with God rejecting humanity's ambition and diverts us by creating thousands of languages so no one could communicate, thus disrupting the cooperation that allowed the tower to be built.
Interestingly our modern world and globalization is perhaps the culmination of humanity's restoration of our "one culture" which allows us to build to the heights of the gods again.
I don't see what God's next move is, in this chess game. I didn't even see the point of God's original move, seeing the tower of babel as ultimately a fantasy, just as I think for all our modern advances we'll just in a new fantasy, fueled by a one time inheritance, without any clear evidence we'll be able to continue the climb much higher.
The ONLY clear success in our "fossil fuel age" is the multiplication of humanity to 6.5 billion, and 9 billion if momentum carries us true.
What could "God's purpose" be in allowing us to multiply so far beyond the carrying capacity of our world? Is He setting up the next major evolutionary step? I certainly except evolution requires a selection process, so whatever else humanity has, we got numbers which can be significantly divided without great harm.
Ah, it is outrageous that the best way to meet the "Step it up" goal of reducing CO2 production by 80% by 2050 is an equivalent drop in population. Maybe the "great plague" is just around the corner. Who's to say who might live or die, or what criteria will decide. We can imagine a game of musical chairs, everyone eyeing their chairs, prepared focused on their goal when the music stops.
I don't know which is more scary, the fact that human population WILL plummet sooner or later by disasters (bad stars) we can't control, OR that we can do it to ourselves intentionally or accidentally. Fear isn't a great teacher perhaps.
We can sing blissfully:
Que Sera Sera,
Whatever will be, will be;
The future's not ours to see
Que Sera Sera,
...
And so for now our tower stands, like every empire, too proud for our own good.
posted by Ares Olympus at 3:27 PM
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