Is Facebook a Modern Tower of Babel?
We often celebrate our modern ability to connect all the people of the world. Our assumption is that connecting people creates unique opportunities for collaboration and creativity. Our hope is that communication, collaboration and creativity will engender positive breakthroughs for humanity, tolerance and understanding. I know that is my hope.
However, ease and speed of communication married to a common language (translations) can turn decidedly negative and evil as well.
In Genesis Chapter 11 we read:
“Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. 3 Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
When everyone can hear you, when everyone can understand you, your evil can get the best of you. If everyone is connected to me, it creates a powerful platform for self-aggrandizement, for “making a name,” for gathering like-minded people for your cause. That cause can be the heavens or, your own version of the heavens.
Facebook is beginning to feel like a modern Tower of Babel. Hate is gathering friends, people are making a name for themselves as they reach for the heavens. See this screenshot of the post entitled “10 Commandments of a Martyr” (the English translation is at this link). The 10th commandment is “I will see you in Heaven.” and everyone could see him and understand that Bahaa was shouting from the top of the Tower of Babel. Then watch the chilling video below of Micah Avni who lost his father to this hate that gathered a following because it is so easy to communicate and nobody disrupted Bahaa like the Lord did in ancient Shinar.
Perhaps, the Lord knew what he was doing:
“5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
Don’t let hate gather a following on Facebook. Stop it before it kills.
