And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.In the Bible, this passage supposedly is God's response to his people wishing to build a tower that will reach heaven. It appears that he does not want them in his house, so he develops a subterfuge to prevent this from happening.
~ King James version ~
Tao is open to all.
~ possible Taoist alternative ~
If Tao had a will -- which Tao doesn't because the Way is not an entity with human attributes -- that will would encourage anyone and everyone to embrace "it." Tao is not purposeful, so Tao would not attempt subterfuge.
If you're interesting reading more from this experimental series, go to the Tao Bible Index page.
Maybe the destruction of the Tower of Babel wasn't a subterfuge.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it was just a natural catastrophe, like a major earthquake or series of earthquakes, and the only way the humans of the time could explain it would be to tell a story that blamed it on God's wrath
(What is Genesis but stories told to try to put into human form events that fell outside the realm of the then-contemporary human understanding?)
And if the earthquakes were big enough, they could have torn continents and people far enough apart, that their languages began to mutate and become different, depending upon where they ended up. . . .
In my mind, the Tao is something different; it's an attitude to counteract all the cultural baggage and paranois that has developed over time, as a result of the stories that were told, not to mention the misreadings of the stories that were espoused.