https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SivbGtQv0EQ
The Tower of Babel is another one of those great stories I’ve puzzled over for ages and thought this is very strange stories and what’s going on here. But yeah, this is everyone gets together and says, you know, if we build this high enough, we’ll get up, we’ll get back to God where we should be. And it’s also the one thing that’s kind of implicit in the story is that it’s getting back to God, but it’s also avoiding the flood because they just came out of a flood. And so they’re saying, if we build up high enough, you know, we’ll reach to God and then we’ll also be safe if there are these waters. Because there’s a tradition that says that the Garden of Eden was never like in Sanfram the Syrian, there’s a tradition that talks about how the Garden of Eden was never flooded and that the water of the flood came up to the gates of the garden and never entered. So this image of this reality, which is above the chaos and kind of holds, and the man says, no, I’m going to build that. I’m going to build a mountain and I’m going to build a thing that’s going to avoid any problem. And like right now, if you understand, like when we look at the control measures of COVID that are being set into place, you get a sense that there’s something of that where people think that they’re going to create a world where there’s no danger, where there’s no risk. This is the machine, isn’t it? Surely, right? This is the fall. This is what you do when you eat the apple, right? You say, I’m not going to trust God, which is the same thing as trusting nature, actually, because that’s the creation, right? I’m not going to trust God. I’m not going to be in the garden. I’m not going to live within the natural law. I’m going to take control of everything and I’m going to build a world which is better. What that means is a world that’s better for people. Okay? So it doesn’t matter if we kill everything else to do that. And it doesn’t matter if we end up actually putting ourselves into a kind of slave state where we have no freedom either, because at least we’re in control. So it’s this desperate grasping for too much order. And then the pendulum swings and in comes the chaos, which is the climate change, which is the extinction, which is the cultural disintegration, because that’s what happens if you try power without wisdom. And that’s, I just, you know, this is this constant, I’m finding, you know, it’s interesting to me when I look at the New Testament, when I look at the Gospels, and I think the ultimate image of Jerusalem there is an image of murderous power, right? I mean, the over-civilization of Jerusalem, it’s when Jesus goes to Jerusalem that he’s tortured and brutalized and killed. Most of the time, he’s wandering around in small cities. He’s hanging around by the lake cooking fish on the shore. He’s, you know, he’s in the small towns, he’s in the villages, he’s going barefoot. It’s when he goes to the city and tries to take the message to the heart of empire, that he ends up crucified. That’s what the power does, you know, it’s like the city as an image of this great controlling kind of Moloch, this Babylon, if you like, there’s always a balance. And if it gets out of balance, you know, we talk about chaos and order, if the balance gets out, this is what you do. And it seems to me that modernity takes obviously takes God out of the picture. And that means it takes humility out of the picture. And if you remove, obviously, anything that’s above you, then you become the center of the picture. So humans are at the center of the modern story. So why not just make the world in our image? And we know where this ends up. This ends up in Silicon Valley. This ends up in transhumanism. This ends up with let’s upload our minds and live forever. And let’s remake everything in the world from the nano level downwards so that it suits modern human beings, which is the kind of the project at the moment. And yeah, absolutely. With the COVID has kind of accelerated this race towards the great controlling machine. And it’s it is like very much like the temptation of the snake, you know, it’s very much like the devil’s offer. So well, you can look, you get all this power, but obviously, you lose all of your freedom, you know, and you destroy the rest of nature. But never mind, because at least you can behave like gods. Transcribed by https://otter.ai