Think of the Tower of Babel as like the Manhattan Project, which is a great example because in the 1930s and 1940s everyone on earth was speaking the same “language” of hyper-nationalism. Immense projects among the nations took place in this grand competition. Through that period we found better ways to kill one another than ever before.

If you struggle to believe that demonic forces are at work in the world, I don’t know how else you can explain what happened in World War II. You can ask, “Why did God allow it?” but you should be asking, “Why did we?”

The problem of pain is always with us, but never was it so obvious as in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s still here, right now. We can choose to sin or not sin. I would guess that if we had lived in the era of the great Assyrian empire, or any empire, we would observe horrors and atrocities, but the scale could not have been so massive as what was on full display in World War II when clearly demonic forces took over Germany. The goal to get rid of Jews is the first sign of demonic forces at work, just as it has always been. To get rid of God requires getting rid of those who speak of God.

To overcome the great evil happening in Germany, another effort sprung up to create a massive bomb. After all, we have to fight fire with fire, right? That is the common language of Babel. So in order for us to stop one country from engaging with demons, we had to all get together and do something that introduced and even larger problem into the world.

In New Mexico, a mini-Babel story happened, but this one ended with a horrific boom.

Scientists came to New Mexico from different nations and spoke different languages, but they all used the same language of English for this one project, rallying around science and competition to defeat a common enemy. However, as we all know, the nations all speak the same underlying language, the common language of Babel. But in this case we had this brotherhood in arms to defeat a common enemy, making it like a pre-Babel party in the southwest.

These thinkers put aside their nationalism and joined together to take on a great project, a project unlike any other before it (except for the Tower of Babel where we invited the demons into the world).

Total war across the world led to a recruitment of the world’s greatest minds to the desert. However, this is one instance where “going to the desert” did not result in purified spirituality. The great minds - Oppenheimer, Fermi, Fuchs, Teller, Lawrence et al. - did not go out to the desert like Moses and Jesus did. In fact, these scientists went to the desert to say yes to the devil instead of do battle against his temptations. They joined, speaking a common language, to build a new Gate to God. They went to the desert to find out how God’s universe works, but not out of curiosity regarding creation like the flower-cataloguing naturalist might, but rather to immolate and destroy those flowers. As God says in Genesis 11 while observing the Tower construction: “…they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach.” Could we not also imagine God saying the same thing as he allowed Oppenheimer to tinker with atoms in Los Alamos? As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so did our “American Prometheus.” And by the way, the myth where Prometheus is portrated as doing a good thing by stealing fire, is propaganda from the Silicon Valley of the ancient world. We have this idea stamped on us today that technology is good, and we just pursue technology for technology’s sake. This is what the Tower of Babel was doing: trying to extract the secrets of God and the universe for our own dirty deeds. As Jesus said, “by their fruits you will know them” (Mt 7:15-20). The fruit of the Enlightenment is a world of nuclear weapons, among other things like carbon-dioxide-gone-wild. In the meantime, we call the old sustainable world of agrarian Christendom “The Dark Ages,” while we scramble to figure out how to block or undo the problems created through our dogged pursuit of God’s secrets.

There is a fascinating exchange about this from two Orthodox priests that I’m stealing at length here about Prometheus, which also applies to the Manhattan Project. This is from the Lord of Spirits podcast, a great source for breaking through the walls of the modernist propaganda that reigns in the media. They take it all the way back to the fall of Cain, and draw out the things we fail to notice in the dense meaning of his fall. Just as you can’t get to heaven without going through the cross, you can’t get to Babel without first going through Cain.

Fr. Stephen: Cain founds the first city. The major figures in Cain’s line who are named, it talks about the technological innovations that they produced, which are weapons of war, all of these things. So this idea is, yes, these spirits gave technology to man, but it was not to benefit man; they were giving man technology that humanity wasn’t ready for, but for destroying themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this same story is played out in multiple other ancient mythologies. The one that probably most of our listeners are familiar with is Greek mythology, and you’ve got the story of Prometheus, who gives fire from the gods to mankind. But of course in that story, it’s depicted as Prometheus… It’s correct in the sense that Prometheus is sort of rebelling, he’s doing something he’s not supposed to be doing, but it’s presented as positive, like: look at this wonderful gift that he gave mankind.

But the problem, of course, is that, again, it’s propaganda. This is these demons saying, “Look at all these good things that we gave you. Why don’t you just go ahead and bow down and worship us?” If you think about that, isn’t that the same thing that’s happening when Christ is tempted by the devil, that the devil offers him stuff? “Look what I’ll do for you if you just bow down and worship me!” Even in our own lives, right? There’s this promise of being great, being smart, being beautiful, being popular, being wealthy, being prestigious—if only you would serve whatever it is that you are asked to serve. It’s a trick. As you said, it’s for their destruction. Notice whom this technology is given to; it’s given to Cain, the first murderer, and to his descendants.

But the problem, of course, is like, you look at this stuff, and you’re like: What’s so wrong with iron-working and with music? What’s wrong with that stuff?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it gets expanded firstly in the book of Jubilees, to include all kinds of things in terms of pharmaceuticals and sorcery and means of seduction of the opposite sex. But even if we’re just talking about raw technology, again, it’s not that it’s evil any more than the tree of knowledge of good and evil is evil in and of itself, but it was wisdom for which humanity wasn’t ready to use it appropriately. So it comes to these men as: “I’m giving you this knowledge so that you can use it to gain power and to conquer your neighbors, to set yourself up as a king, to seduce members of the opposite sex, so you will have this power and wealth and authority,” and that’s what humanity uses it for.

In New Mexico, Prometheus returned with fire again, and we were instructed in public school what a marvel this discovery was, where science and engineering “saved us” from Germany. I even recall watching Fat Man and Little Boy in science class as a kind of celebration of science. But science makes for a bad savior if it wins a battle by setting the stage for a much bigger and far worse war in the future. That’s not a savior at all. That’s a captor. We are in the same boat now with other problems stemming from our rush for technology, like cars that spewed carbon dioxide for a century, and a generation of lost souls who were raised on iPhones. You might even argue that we haven’t even figured out how to handle fire properly yet, let alone nukes or smart phones.

The great scientific and engineering minds proved that the secrets of the atom were not out of their reach. What they presumed was possible, became a reality. Like Geppetto, the dream to will an idea into existence turned Little Boy into a real atomic bomb. But it did not open a Gate to God. The Gate of Fission was opened, bringing down a new kind of demon. The solution created a short lived peace as the arms race and space race began. We found one of the great secrets of how God’s universe functioned. The great minds had “pulled” God closer to earth and elevated humans, or so we thought, in the process.

The payoff was to be endless free energy, but it didn’t pan out. We were just left with the bombs. Most of the nuclear power plants are being shutdown today, while the warheads remain ready to fire. So in cracking the atomic code and creating what seemed like a gateway to the power of God, we ended up more like toddlers playing around with grenades in a crib. At the end of the project, the scientists disbanded and returned to their universities, but the knowledge stayed and proliferated to “the nations” and we now have the modern doctrine of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. This is the language of Babel fully articulated.

Competition and greed lead to a prison-like behavior among the inmates, where you must dominate or be dominated, and as Ghandi may have said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

After the Tower of the Mushroom Cloud was built successfully and displayed to the world in its awesome terror, the scientists’ newfound instructions for building the Gate trickled out to all corners of the world, and now we have about ten nations who have these giant firecrackers ready to destroy billions of people, hinged on the decision of fallible people in leadership roles.

So we came together for a while under a common goal: to defeat nations clearly under demonic possession. How did we solve it? By inviting demons to possess us. To defeat one powerful nation speaking Babel, we got together and spoke Babel to create something even more awful. Then once the war ended, it seemed that nothing like that dramatic or awful could ever happen again. The nations proceeded to ensure that it will happen by building many, many more bombs. The nations are now nervously smiling at one another, meeting in uneasy groups, wearing the fig leaves of NATO and the United Nations and the European Union, while holding loaded revolvers to each others’ heads.

Something interesting began to happen after the war. Nationalism became a dirty word. The pendulum had swung to peak nationalism, and the reality of what the nations were capable of doing to one another began to look like a bad idea. Another way of saying it is that the idea of “the nations” itself looked like a bad idea. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, back toward the pre-Babel world where all the world was one nation. We are going back in time, to the days of Noah. There is a sense of inversion and reversal happening in quite a few parts of the Bible. Most of the Christian message is an inversion of the pagan, pluralistic world, which is exactly what it means to unlearn the language of Babel.

The separation of nations was reduced somewhat in the aftermath of the war, as large conglomerates formed. There was a period where the opposite direction of Babel seemed to happen, where nations were kind of congealing, in some cases by force, and others by legitimate healing. While Russia used the sword, the West seemed to be in a state of repair, for a while anyway.

After the war, Western nations thought it was obviously a bad idea to get caught up in nationalism and patriotism. Boundaries began to be removed or reduced to help foster cross-border trade and travel. While the Eastern Bloc was being beaten into submission, the Western nations were coming together, all while keeping a cold steely eye on its enemies. There was a pre-Babel impulse called globalization that took shape, and is still underway now. The lingua franca of the world became English. But underneath English was still the really old common language, that of competition and control. Even if the world became one nation again, as some suspect is happening, control would still be the underlying game.

Was all of this a part of God’s plan?

Apparently it was.

Rather, it is. His plan is still happening right now.

As Peter said to Jesus about the Eucharist: This is a hard thing to accept. But accept it we must, if we are to trust in God’s will, his plan. If we are to make progress in the Christian life, total trust in Jesus and the Body of Christ, his Church, is needed. We float on the sea in the ship of the Church, singing songs and sharing the sacred meal, while the storm rages around us. We just have to stop fighting in the ship itself. We must stick to sound doctrine, proper worship, and unwavering focus on Jesus. The great trial is coming, but we already knew that.

To stop speaking Babel, we have to start speaking Pentecost, and I’m not talking about making nonsense noises. I’m talking about the process of letting go, forgiving, and not needing to win. I’m talking about doing what is right even when the world says it is wrong. I’m talking about turning away from the game.

We now face the same pluralistic world that the apostles did, with the added threat (bonus points?) of nuclear annihilation and cyberwar. This should not make Christ’s followers angry however; we should be overjoyed, as always, because death has no sting. As I’ve mentioned, Jesus did not get angry at the lost sheep; he went out to save them. That is the task now, and it was the task then. If the world intends to blow itself up, then that is God’s will for reasons unfathomable to us. Our commission is not winning the war with guns, ours is in fighting the spiritual war. The same weapons are to be used: to believe, to be baptized, to pray, to fast, to sin no more, to keep his commandments, and to go make disciples of all the nations. The harvest is enormous but the laborers are few. What else is new?

Today we are all speaking the same language in both English and that of Babel. The language is that of competition and pride, shame and honor. Whether or not capitalism or communism won, this language of the culture would be the same. Communism just has a higher body count.

We don’t seem to have been scattered again…not just yet. We have the means to self-scatter now through weapons, but there will be a different kind of scattering soon, and it seems there is a scattering or atomization as we lose focus on our families and the nation, and we move into the isolated world of technology where we live in the cold kingdom of “My truth.”

We are living right now in the post-Manhattan Project, post-Cold War, era of globalization, and as the world comes together in consolidating nations, we grow further apart in our families and communities.

We are going backward, toward the Big Bang that happened at Babel, before the scattering, when everyone spoke the language of Babel and understood each other. We are going back toward the era before the nations, but I don’t think it will be what we expect or want when we get there, and I know it won’t be if we try to do it without God’s blessing.

You might say that technology is the tool that allows us all to communicate with the same protocols today. What this means, however, is that we are returning to a state of pluralism.

Thus we are not only going back toward the time of Babel, but we are going further back, returning to the time of Noah. In fact, with the advent of the Internet in 1995, you could say we have already passed the time of Babel, and are now hurtling toward the state of the world when Noah and his family were the last ones standing after the flood. And if we go that far, we may be going back further still, to the state of the world where God saw the flood as necessary to cleanse the world. As God said in the flood story, he would never again drown the world. He said he wouldn’t use water the next time. But he didn’t say anything about fire.

Jesus on the other hand said something concerning, as we observe our world spinning into chaos, becoming more and more like the days of Noah before the flood.

But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away. So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come. (Mt 24:36-44)

Stay awake. If you are short on time, you really only need the first three chapters in Genesis to get the main point of the fall in the Bible. Many people of great faith can stop at Genesis 3 and take a time machine to leap ahead to the Gospels. Many understand all they need for their faith to thrive with that alone. This saves them the burden of trying to slog through Leviticus and Numbers, too.

All of what you need to know is in the first Fall in the Garden, and while the living God may be hard to make sense of in those early pages of the Bible, the clarity of that living God comes fully alive in Jesus, in the Gospels. If you read the Gospels, and re-read them, and read them for the rest of your life, you will see that that Jesus is God. Or you at least have to wrestle with Jesus as God, because he says it over and over. It’s important to actually read the Gospels and not take what a YouTube personality says it is, especially one that doesn’t know what sin actually is. You have to read or hear the words of a man who cannot be explained, who can perform miracles, and who doesn’t sound crazy somehow when he claims that he IS the living God. This can be done alone, but is best done in groups of people, with those who are trying to unlearn the language of Babel. You unlearn it by spending time with the Gospel, and pondering lines like these:

“Whoever sees me, sees him who sent me.”

“I and the Father are one.”

“Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”

You have to decide if he is God. If you have heard the words of the Gospel, you must respond to it. While Jesus is making these claims, you have to compare his claims against the fact that sin and disorder and suffering are in the world, and compare his message to that reality.

What do you make of a God who came here to suffer like us? To partake in the same pain and suffering that we experience? That to me is far more powerful than some self-help book that peddles worn out platitudes of “Be yourself.” If you want your suffering to be transformed into something meaningful, Jesus Christ is the only God that can show you how that is actually possible.

The reason why Genesis keeps striking people as true in each passing century is because of observable facts of history, and more importantly, the experience of our own journeys. The story of life is on repeat. We all suffer. It’s unavoidable. The question is: how are you going to deal with it? Will you take revenge? Will you run away? Or will you look to Christ for the answer when you cannot stand another day?

The chaos waits to rise in our lives. We see order in nature, but disorder in people. What is the answer to handling this chaos? Let’s just summarize the whole Bible in four lines:

Nature is ordered.

People are not.

We need a savior.

Enter Jesus.

The end.

Or maybe this one is better:

Nature is ordered.

People are not.

We need a savior.

Jesus is God.

The end.

There, that gives us the creation, the fall, the problem, and the solution, without the need to carry around a large book.

The ordering and disordering of our world is a constant obsession with us, especially when we think we are the ones putting things in order. Dictators and ‘Tiger Mothers’ have an extremely high sense of order, but while both attempt to cram their world into a box, everything they stuff inside gets damaged. Why? Because they are not God but they are assuming that role. The root motive for every dictator is the same as every sports-obsessed parent: to win, to be the best, and thereby be justified, and thereby be proud, and thereby feel loved. Actions taken out of pride are cries for help to be loved and approved. If only they knew that the love is available without all the struggle, that they can be loved without winning, without any effort at all!

No matter how you chop up the story, the root problem of disordered choices is pride. Adam, Cain, Babel: all three “falls” stem from pride of self over humility before God. The worldview of Babel is simple when you burn off all the slag on top of it: the word is competition. Now there is competition in nature, but not like that of humans. “Survival of the fittest” does not explain the Empire State Building. It does not explain the heart of darkness in humans that goes far beyond that of plants fighting for sun or wolves scrapping for alpha. Plants and animals stop consuming and fighting when they get the food or the high ground in genetics. When nature becomes unbalanced, they balance out. Whereas we do not. Jeff Bezos continues amassing wealth long after he had enough, long after he could have stopped. Coca-Cola didn’t stop spewing out plastic bottles once we all noticed it has created a horrid mess, nor did they stop shoving sugar at people once obesity became the norm. To win, you have to maintain the attitude of “to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.” Money, fame, sex, power, honor: these are a few of our favorite things, and once tasted and chosen, there is never enough. Addicts don’t quit wanting the thing that makes them miserable. The competition is on. If we are not playing ourselves, then we cheer it on. The language of empire speaks of victory, winning, getting a better deal, finding a loophole, getting away with something. When this is your worldview, it devolves gradually into “rules for thee but not for me.”

Why? Because winning. Because we want to get what we want. Because the need to win overrules morality and fair-play. That is the whole game. Once you start to realize the winners are cheating, then the jig is up. Hasn’t the Olympics and Tour-de-France races taught us this repeatedly in recent decades? Hasn’t every hero-athlete who is later revealed as a dope user shown us this fact? Didn’t the Houston Astros show us how winning the World Series has less to do with talent and hard-work than finding a way to cheat? Didn’t inflate-gate and spy-gate and every other “gate” scandal show us that the culture of competition leads to a downhill slide?

Likewise, hasn’t every empire that ever existed cheated and brawled its way to success painted itself as an honest, plucky hard worker? The Romans picked Virgil to write the legend of their path to glory. America had Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson to sell the narrative. There is a maxim that behind every fortune lies a great crime, and that applied to nations as well. What does all of this tell us? It does not tell me that we need to overthrow the government or adopt a socialist government, as it does to some today. No, it tells and re-tells me that the “shiny one” whispers ideas into our ears and we agree. We nod all too willingly, eager to win, with a chaser thought close behind of how we’ll craft our mischief into an obstacle that we had to overcome. We sell sin to ourselves as a virtue. The secret sauce of all success is to tell a story that spins our sin into gold.

You can hear this in small-talk everywhere, and even though I may only hear it in America today, the same choice of wealth and pleasure over humility before God was obviously the attitude in Babel. The line in the Tower of Babel story states it like the unspoken intention of every LinkedIn profile: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” (Gn 11:4)

How do you make a name for yourself? By winning. By getting ahead. By stepping on the guy’s head who is directly beneath you and pulling on the lady’s leg who is directly above. By using whatever means necessary to get something more than the guy in the next cubicle. The language that was used in Babel was that of competition. You might even say it was more of a feel or vibe than a language. America was not founded entirely on the principle of competition in the pit, but along the way, the “City on a Hill” morphed into the “Tower of Babel.”

Every person and people must make a choice. This is a choice that defines their life in the end. We think of choices in belief as small, as not mattering all that much, but what you believe factors into nearly every decision you make. “How you do anything is how you do everything.” That quote causes me to shudder, as I know how my lack of attention to detail could land me East of Eden forever. Belief matters and the quote could be, “What you believe drives how you do everything.” Belief drives action, and action drives belief. Let faith in Christ become the center of all events in your life. Do not waver, do not look away. Peter sinks in the water because he gets scared when the wind comes up. He looks away. Stop being yourself. Put aside the modern nonsense of your own specialness and be special for someone else. Call your mother. Go visit an old person. The only thing that is holding you back is your personal goals. Stop chasing pipe dreams. Be like Christ. See Christ in others. Let the rituals of the Mass guide your days, and revel in the fact that you can partake physically in the Body and Blood of Christ. Not only can you imitate Christ, you can be physically formed to him. The choice of who we believe in can be seen in the language we speak and the actions we take. Remember that most of all, this choice is not shown externally. This choice must be made in the heart. Pray to God that he reaches to you, asking for his spirit to be sent to you. The only thing you can offer to God in trade is your whole life. He wants you to ask. He likes you. He’s waiting. You can either ask, or he will ask you, and it usually works out best if you ask first. Humility is when you ask him, and humiliation is when he is done messing around hinting, and asks you directly. Shoot for the first option.

Ask him to find you: “Draw me, Lord, and we will run.”

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