If God gave us His only word in a book, wasn't that whole Tower of Babel incident kinda silly ?

Question

The gospel of John reads "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." Logos is often translated into English as "word" but can also mean thought, speech, meaning, reason, proportion, principle, standard, or logic, among other things.

There isn't a really good English translation for Logos, which is one of the most important words in the original Bible.

If Gods wants us to know Him through His word, the Bible, why on earth did He create all those different languages, and with that take a huge risk of us losing the true meaning of His word?

Answer 1

"The Bible" is a collection of the least erroneous texts that could be found (although anyone who has studied it properly will know that there are holes all over the place) so God never made "The Bible" holy. The Old Testament was compiled during the reign of King Josiah in 7th century BC, the New Testament I think was the 15th century AD. The amount of disregarded (and mostly now lost forever) "holy" scriptures is unbelievable. In the New Testament especially (where these books are considered apocryphal) many of the books tell a completely different story of Jesus, many portray him as a much sterner, more Old Testament figure and barely any of them give him any "divinity". The divinity of Christ was actually only added around the time of Emporer Constantine in Rome when he was desperately trying to convert the Roman Empire to Christianity to stop the divisions over the new world and old world "gods" - giving Jesus a divine status was the only way to ensure people would worship him instead of their own gods.

Another mistranslation from the Bible is that the original word used to describe Mary is translated as "young woman" rather than "virgin" - virgin was used at the time as it meant young woman, in much the same way that we no longer use "gay" to mean happy, we no longer say virgin to mean "young woman". This misinterpretation lead to the eventual divine status of Mary and the story of the immaculate conception, which is in fact a man made invention - as is most of the Bible, having been written by man.

Personally I would feel a bit silly to base my entire life on the selective, badly translated writings of poorly educated men who lived in barren conditions and had no point of reference to compare these "great events" to. I instead believe in what is true for me, and have no beliefs, just ideas about what is the true nature of the world. I still pray, just not to a guy in a beard on top of a cloud!

Logos - look into the Stoics as started by Zeno, they believed in logos and it had a definite meaning - as this predates the bible entry I would assume they were talking about the same thing.

Answer 2

As you say, the Logos has connotations greater than mere words, but reason as well. Besides, the event of Babel was written in Hebrew, not Greek (as Logos is Greek).

Answer 3

The story of Babel was a metaphor of how belief in God intends to thwart progress at every step.

If God existed he knew getting to heaven in a sky scraper made of clay and stone was not possible and that man would have eventually learned that the engineering effort was fruitless.

Instead of letting man find out for himself through trial and error, he just hit them with a bolt of gibberish lightning and they lost their common language and apparently their human ability to read body language. Which caused them to abandon the project.

Apparently God doesn't like engineers who don't understand that heaven is too far away.

Answer 4

To teach us the folly of our own arrogance.

Answer 5

and why was he so opposed to cooperation?