everything. [The Tower of Babel:] if you try to work with your neighbors and community to better yourself and your communal life, God will personally knock it all down and scatter you just for having the nerve to try
Wow. That’s so fascinating. This is a belief of mine and I have no idea where I got it from. I mean I got it from my parents, but they’re not religious. I wonder which ancestor passed this down.
The lesson of the Tower of Babel is even more than that. It’s about not lifting your expectations, not assuming ideas above your station, staying in your assigned lane in life even if you hate it. What you see here is the “divine punishment” for that.
But for many centuries that idea was actually a given, unless you were born to wealth, and it was only huge, societal upheavals like the Great Plague or a series of unending wars or famines that rearranged everything every few hundred years. And even then it’s only in the last century that humans in general have enjoyed a level of privilege and prosperity that means for most of us, we have never known a starving person or been in fear of it ourselves, for example. Never having to fear hunger or a bad crop season was not something most of these people could even imagine.
So if the ancestors of which you speak were born around the turn of the 20th century and were neither rich nor landowners, and could thus expect a life spent in a service or trade, they’d have had this exact same kind of “don’t get ideas, just do what you’re told and be grateful it isn’t worse” drilled into them by their own parents. Mine certainly were. And I’m absolutely certain that’s why the state of Texas wants to reintroduce the idea to young minds.
But it’s your belief. Does it serve you? You can find out where it came from. If you accepted this belief in your own life and can’t remember it, it may not have been passed down: it could be something that was just really painful for you as a young person and you took the lesson and shoved away the painful memory that delivered it. (I also have a friend who’d insist it’s a past life thing and you should do a regression to find out, but that’s not really up everyone’s alley, lol.) Anyway, if it is of interest to you, you should look into it in whatever way appeals to you, you might be surprised at what you find. Learning who you are and why you are the way you are is never a waste of time, IMO.
Wow. That’s so fascinating. This is a belief of mine and I have no idea where I got it from. I mean I got it from my parents, but they’re not religious. I wonder which ancestor passed this down.
The lesson of the Tower of Babel is even more than that. It’s about not lifting your expectations, not assuming ideas above your station, staying in your assigned lane in life even if you hate it. What you see here is the “divine punishment” for that.
But for many centuries that idea was actually a given, unless you were born to wealth, and it was only huge, societal upheavals like the Great Plague or a series of unending wars or famines that rearranged everything every few hundred years. And even then it’s only in the last century that humans in general have enjoyed a level of privilege and prosperity that means for most of us, we have never known a starving person or been in fear of it ourselves, for example. Never having to fear hunger or a bad crop season was not something most of these people could even imagine.
So if the ancestors of which you speak were born around the turn of the 20th century and were neither rich nor landowners, and could thus expect a life spent in a service or trade, they’d have had this exact same kind of “don’t get ideas, just do what you’re told and be grateful it isn’t worse” drilled into them by their own parents. Mine certainly were. And I’m absolutely certain that’s why the state of Texas wants to reintroduce the idea to young minds.
But it’s your belief. Does it serve you? You can find out where it came from. If you accepted this belief in your own life and can’t remember it, it may not have been passed down: it could be something that was just really painful for you as a young person and you took the lesson and shoved away the painful memory that delivered it. (I also have a friend who’d insist it’s a past life thing and you should do a regression to find out, but that’s not really up everyone’s alley, lol.) Anyway, if it is of interest to you, you should look into it in whatever way appeals to you, you might be surprised at what you find. Learning who you are and why you are the way you are is never a waste of time, IMO.