The common language of Babel is a more subtle message than the idea of language as we think of it. The mention of the Table of Nations right before the Tower of Babel is a key connection to make. If we want to know why Russia invaded Ukraine, or Caesar crossed the Rubicon, we can step back and ask ourselves, what common language do all nations speak? Or closer to home, what common language do we all as individuals speak?

The common language is not only seen in war, but that is the grossest and most full expression of it. The bombs being lobbed into apartment buildings in Kiev are shouting the language right now.

But really our common language can be heard in the nicest of phrases, and spoken from the kindest of faces. A few good examples of the common language are as follows: Benjamin Franklin, in the 18th century, said, “God helps those who helps themselves.” That is one version of the common language. A more blunt version of the common language is from the 21st century rapper, Fifty Cent, who said, “Get rich or die trying.”

Ben Franklin and Fifty Cent speak the same language. Yes, they both speak English, but more importantly, they speak the original common language, the ancient one, the same as those who were building the Tower of Babel.

Franklin and Fifty are expressing the same idea in different words, separated by a few hundred years. Ben and Fifty are fluent in the the pre-Babel language of “making a name for themselves.” Both orient their lives toward the goal of gaining money and taking power. Gordon Gecko’s famous line spoke the language, fully dropping the facade of Franklin, when he said, “Greed is good.”

Franklin invented a proverb that almost sounds Biblical, but rest assured, it is not. God does not help those that help themselves. He would much rather that they imitate Jesus and give their lives to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. For all the contributions Franklin made to the founding of America, he did not in any way imitate Jesus. Moral perfection was an interest of Franklin, so long as it was achieved without the Christian God. He tackled the subject in a truly modern way, even using a paper version of a spreadsheet to track his progress, working on one virtue at a time. Father Scupoli was a few hundred years ahead of Franklin, when in 1589 he said, “Virtues are to be required one at a time and by degrees,” except Scupoli’s project included God and required no spreadsheet. In many ways, Franklin’s paper project was attempting exactly the same thing that was happening at the construction site in Babel, just without masonry or mortar.

Let’s talk more about Benjamin Franklin, the gentle old bespectacled grandfatherly figure of American history who graces the front side of every one hundred dollar bill in print. He is a fascinating character who embodies much of the American character and the best intentions of the Enlightenment.

First, Franklin was a Deist, not a Christian. The same goes for George Washington. Franklin was also a practicing Freemason. Even if Washington and Franklin publicly claimed to be Christian, as practicing Freemasons, they likely just found references to God useful for advancing their own public lives among the peasants. This is important to understand, as this is the same root motive that drives an ancient people to build a Ziggurat. The ancient people went to great lengths to justify their power, requiring a lot of stone and labor. Nations needed an awesome structure to control the people, while the Deists of the Enlightenment just declared man and his mind to be the tallest. The modern temple is intellectual, existing in the mind, but still requires assent of the masses. There is just no need to build a tower to reach the sky now, because no lower-case gods need ritual sacrifices or transactions. (We actually do have plenty of rituals and sacrifices still with us, but they are not as obvious now, and I’ll need a whole separate series to discuss that topic.)

Instead of building towers, the Deists kept the upper-case God in our mouths, but tried to move him off-stage, kind of like giving a lifetime achievement award to a good actor that never won an Oscar. Jefferson threw God a medal in the Declaration of Independence and then asked him to kindly step aside and retire.

To this day, a nod toward God goes a long way for politicians, even as they completely ignore him in their policies and personal lives. Of course, everyone is a sinner, so it’s not surprising or even noteworthy that people fall down and appear hypocritical, so I’m not pointing out the failure of politicians to be “good” Christians. What I am suggesting that very few of the Founders were Christian at all, because a practicing Freemason like Franklin or Washington cannot be a Christian any more than a practicing Jew could be a Hindu. They do not go together. Attempting to claim co-existence of Christianity and Freemasonry requires a lot of spinning plates and hula hoops and tambourines and fireworks. Freemasonry is an open rejection of the living God of Israel, and certainly the Trinitarian God of Christianity.

Franklin believed in a Clockmaker God, a being who set the stars in motion and left the lights on before retiring into the beyond. He’s like a gamer who started a video game on auto-mode and went to bed. The Deist idea of God is a Creator that requires no worship and demands nothing. In other words, it’s an absentee father who left long ago and left us free to do whatever we like. The Clockmaker version of God has no relation whatsoever with the living God of Christian faith, because that Bible ends at chapter two of Genesis. Nothing more is needed beyond creation.

Why am I picking on Ben Franklin here? He is the poster child of the common language spoken by the architects of Babel.

Franklin spoke the language of Babel, because the language of Babylon is declaring a deity that either serves us, or doesn’t matter, or both. A Ziggurat is an expensive, fancy way of trying to communicate with and manipulate a god. This required a lot of ritual and song and dance and smoke to sell the idea. But what happens with a Ziggurat is the same thing that happens with Deism. The human, the self, bubbles up as the new deity. Pride rises like hot air and overtakes humility, and the virtues get swapped. Pride rises, humility sinks; it very much matches the behavior of hot and cold air masses. Humility kneels, while pride tries to grasp God.

Franklin did not try to deny that God exists, but rather to deny that God matters. This trick makes for a dead deity instead of a living God still present with us. The Clockmaker God opens the door to this. The result of the long onslaught of Enlightenment thinking is a polite depositing of God in the dustbin of history. If you punch your vote for the Clockmaker God, like Franklin did in his weekly Masonic meetings, then there is little or no difference from denying the existence of God entirely, or making bogus sacrifices in a Ziggurat to justify your power. The false gods of Babel were made in the image and likeness of the ruling class, and the Clockmaker God’s image and likeness doesn’t matter at all because he’s on permanent vacation.

More importantly, the Clockmaker God is not needed to forgive anything, because just like the rulers of Babel, the rules are decided by those in power, or in other words, “those who help themselves.” The pagan god who demanded sacrifice was not alive, but at least the illusion was more lively than that of the Clockmaker God. When the authority of the living Creator God who sustains all things is gone, then there is nothing holding back “those who help themselves.” The proverb of Franklin is essentially a nice way of arguing for will-to-power, as in, win at all costs.

In Franklin’s cosmology, there is no cosmic justice, no everlasting judgment, and the conscience is just a nag that you need to stifle. The cookie jar is just as open and unattended with the Clockmaker God of a deist as it is for the atheist who says there is no God at all.

In fact, the atheist is really the only honest one. This is why I think our age of atheism has a lot of people coming around, the long way, back to belief in the true God, the living Creator God. All of the other trick gods are so obviously false (Zeus) or pointless (deism), that the only God that makes sense, the only one that can even satisfy the intellect and give purpose to our lives, is the transcendent living Creator God. All the other gods don’t matter or are total frauds. In any other cosmos than that of the God of Abraham, we can do whatever we like, and like Franklin, we can help ourselves to whatever we like. A dead or silent God leads directly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Michel Foucault.

A pagan god can at least command fear, but without that new methods are needed. The thunder god who throws lightning and causes storms only has power through fear. The storm god keeps the lightning nearby to strike if he is disrespected, as he is the one who unleashes havoc on the world. He must be appeased with worship, otherwise he will show us who is boss. The storm god that oddly matches worldly power, in that he is in competition with creation and craves adoration as payment. If he gets what he wants, you will receive a reward. There are many modern Christians who understand God in this way and need to break free from this model, because they are playing the same game of Babel as well.

On the other hand, a Clockmaker God commands nothing. He is the god of indifference. A God that created matter and exited the stage, doesn’t matter at all. It’s like a teacher who leaves the classroom and tells the students to behave. He’s a powerless joke. The hall monitor is gone, so what’s the difference between an absent God that created the universe against a pre-existing universe with no God at all? There is none. The latter is just much easier to live with, except you need something called “the rule of law” to assert control by pretending at objective truth. The funny thing is, however, that the ground for objective truth starts to shake when it’s just a set of rules etched in stone outside a courthouse. Eventually people see through this game as well. What we call “the rule of law” is our new storm god, in the form of courts, police, and in its most full form, SWAT teams and the National Guard. As the masses come around more to match Franklin’s idea of God, or worse, Marx’s idea of God, the jig is up. The pretense of objective truth gets jettisoned for “my truth.”

In either case, there are no rules except what we decide. Ziggurat or no Ziggurat: the god of Babel and the God of Franklin is the one that “helps those who help themselves.” The only thing that comes to matter in this worldview is power. That is the common language of Babel. That is what we want.

However, a living God that knows the number of hairs on your head matters a great deal. That God is the only one that can change our behavior out of love. There is a reason that the God of the Bible has lasted so long. This God satisfies our souls. He fits our lives. He explains everything. He is also the only real one.

The God of Israel, who we have come to understand better in the revelation of the Trinity, is the only one that can make all of our difficulties in life suddenly fall into place, just like he did in creating the universe. Once this concept of God is understood, both suffering and love begin to make sense. The main reason this happens, and keeps happening in every generation, is because, this God is real, and this God is alive.

The language that is being spoke in the Tower of Babel story is not really referring to Sumerian or Akkadian or Greek or Latin. No, it means a worldview that celebrates a culture of competition, power-seeking, comfort-seeking, possession-seeking, and pleasure-seeking. What we really want is God to approve our desires, but our conscience is God’s messenger that lets us know in subtle ways that he will never approve of those things. The worldview or common language is the little voice that tells us otherwise, that suggests that we elevate our pursuits over the glory of God. What we want, instinctually, is salvation independent of God. A Ziggurat is built to pull the gods down, to shape god to match our human pursuits, to justify ourselves. The correct approach to God is to stop trying to manipulate him, because he cannot be manipulated, and rather we need to conform our human pursuits to the will of the one true God.

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