Tower of Babel

For the last few days, the first post in the morning has been somewhat loosely about religion.  It is loosely about religion because I am not exactly a religious person.  But I do like to think about things and to write about them, and this thought about the Tower of Babel came to mind.  Given the fact that I'm not so religious, the knowledge of this was not firmly in my mind, so I went to the Wikipedia and looked it up, as mentioned in the previous post.

I wrote that post and left the computer for awhile to do something else and came back just now to the original idea, and found this.  What I found struck me, so I'll quote it again below:

God came to see their city and the tower they were building. He perceived their intentions, and in His infinite wisdom, He knew this "stairway to heaven" would only lead the people away from God.

This is an odd thought to me.

Should people construe this to mean that there should be no civilization at all and nothing should be built because it will ultimately be an affront to God?  I don't see building a tower can lead people away from God, nor lead people to God.  It is only a building.

Someone may say, "you are missing the point".  Perhaps, but I am only speculating here as to the way people actually take this.  It could explain some resistance to the idea of space settlement, because it could interpreted as a "stairway to heaven", which would do the same thing as the Tower did.

My interpretation is that the Tower serves as a metaphor for a complexity which cannot be sustained.  The current state of the world could be like that Tower and that is the thought that I wanted to relate.  To put it succinctly, things are getting too complicated.  The world, or God if you will, will find a way to simplify things, and when that happens, it may not be pretty.  It just might get pretty messy.

I don't think space settlement would be like the Tower. It would just mean starting over in a new land, like starting over in the New World after its discovery. When the Old World gets to be too much, it may be handy to have a new place to go to.

The USA served for that purpose for most of our history, but I see this country changing into something more like the Old World, which is not such a good thing for the cause of freedom- religious or otherwise.