Today's headlines online (and on the front page of the New York Times as I noticed at the grocery store this morning) were all about how Pope Leo XIV "paints a bleak AI future" with a literal Tower of Babel scenario:
"As technology continues to develop, the Pope said humanity is facing a choice to either 'construct a new Tower of Babel, or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together,' ” reports an article published today by Forbes magazine. "The biblical story tells of a human effort to build a city putting humanity on par with the divine.
Specifically, Pope Leo said in his first encyclical, "When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.
"We must, then, avoid the 'Babel syndrome,' namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.'
The Pope's warning went on, " 'When every action—movements, purchases, relationships and preferences—leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fully aware of it.
" 'Freedom in the digital age is not merely a matter of interiority but also a public concern... At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit. What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for freedom and human dignity. Some post-humanist currents even go so far as to envision 'second-class' human beings, subordinate to the interests of elites who consider themselves superior.”
*****
"Politically, economically, and ecclesiastically, the nations today are attempting to reverse what God did at Babel in dividing the nations. The United nations, the New World Order, the European Union are all manifestations of this vain imagination of men that will succeed for a little time,” writes Bible scholar Noah Hutchings in his book God Divided the Nations.
“God looked down through the ages and saw the time when Satan would deceive the nations with another Babylonish scheme: The dictator of a world government would repeat the attempt made by Nebuchadnezzar to command all nations and peoples to worship his image as God or be killed.”
*****
“When God destroys the international scheme at Babel by confounding their language, isn’t it interesting that all He had to do was just make them not talk the same language?” ponders Richard Jordan. “Some little simple thing and it overthrew everything they were doing. I’ve tried to wonder about what it would have been like.
“Here they’re diligently building this thing and they’re working on it and then the Lord just gives a ‘SNAP!’ of the fingers and BOOM, now there’s 10,000 fellows talking German, 10,000 talking Korean, 10,000 talking Spanish, 10,000 talking Chinese Mandarin, 10,000 talking French and 10,000 still talking in Hebrew.
“You got this guy who goes up the ladder and says, ‘Hand me a brick,’ and the guy down below thinks he’s saying, ‘Pull the ladder out from under me.’ A guy says to a guy below, ‘Give me the brick!’ but the guy above him thinks he says, ‘Hit me in the head with one!’
“Can you imagine? You know how that would be. Suddenly everything’s been thwarted. Just some little simple thing like stopped the thing dead in its tracks. That thing would get looking like a Chinese fire drill within a half-hour.
“It’d be a mess and then you’d find somebody you could talk to and realize, ‘Man, let’s you and me stay close together because this is BAD out here today! Things are confused!’ That’s how they get to dividing up and going their own way.
*****
“Come to Revelation 17 and see the prophetic significance of what’s going on there. Dispensationally what’s happening there is God’s giving up the Gentiles. He’s giving up the nations.
“They have rejected nationalism for internationalism and He comes in and throttles that rejection of His principle so that the divine institutions He set up would continue to function.
“God rejects the nations and sets them aside, suffering them to walk in their own way as He turns to one man, one family, and says, ‘I’m going to make you a great nation and I’m going to use you to be the example to everybody else about how nationalism ought to work. These people are too hardheaded, dumb, thickheaded, rotten rascals to learn it from me, so I’ve just got to take them and give them ONE example in the earth of what it is to be a nation that walks in my precepts and according to my principles.’
“He sets one nation up; the nation Israel. Israel’s purpose, folks, was not to be something special because they were so wonderful. They were to be a testimony before the nations of what it was for a nation to walk with the Lord, and they were to be the shining light and example of nationalism in all of its proprieties.
“You know what happened to them, though? They failed to bear that testimony repeatedly, but yet God Himself will do for them one day what they couldn’t do for themselves and then the nations of the earth will come to them and emulate their example and walk with them.
“Prophetically, this thing about the internationalism—this CITY and this TOWER, this POLITICAL system and this RELIGIOUS system that are set up at the Tower of Babel—goes all the way through to the Antichrist and culminates in his ministry.”
Hutchings writes, “We have noted that with Israel’s restoration in 1948 to nationhood and statehood, the characteristic of these end-times is an attempt to bring back into a single fold the nations that were scattered by God at the Tower of Babel. As the United Nation’s name indicates, they are determined to unite under one ruler. They will not have long to wait.”