God's Response to Our Break with Him

With our ancestors Adam and Eve, we humans broke our relationship with God. When we did this, we created a situation unintended by God. Rather than living with him and one another in a relationship of truth, freedom, love, and vitality, we suddenly found ourselves the inescapable victims and unwitting collaborators of parasitic powers.

These parasitic powers, including the six gods of Olympianity, deceived us into defining the meaning of our lives in terms of politics, war, technology, sex, money, and consumption. These six gods then bullied and bribed us into treating other humans and the rest of creation simply as means of living meaningfully in those terms.

Tower of Babel

Here, in the land of Shinar, we humans want to make a name for ourselves (Genesis 11:4a, English Standard Version here and following). We have no interest in being named by Yahweh and responsible to him. We want to think of ourselves as autonomous in relation to Yahweh, as self-centered rather than theocentric, even if thinking so only binds us more tightly to false Olympian gods.