The Bible only acknowledges separation of body and soul at one point in life: death. In the end every Babelish expression of bending technology to our will is to escape the awful reality of that ultimate separation. Yet that won’t stop us trying for new Babels as newer and more integrated bricks and mortar become available to us scientifically, are championed to us culturally and intellectually, and enforced among us legislatively.

The goal of humanity outside of God appears to be to loose ourselves from the surly bonds of our earthiness and become whoever we wish to be. To not only make a name for ourselves, but to forge new identities for ourselves. Humans 2.0.

In that sense everything on the spectrum from transgenderism to transhumanism is a Tower of Babel project. And in 2026 we now have the most amazing transformative, technologies, ones that we did not have before but could only imagine in the sci-fi works of the past one hundred years.

We are not only at Humans 2.0, we are at Babel 2.0, a supercharged version that the original builders could only have dreamed about.

The Babel text in Genesis 11 states:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

The new technology of bricks and mortar – as opposed to mere stone – permitted humans to build much higher, with more stability, than previously. With the power to do so, they decide to build a tower to the heavens. The morality of such a decision is not up for grabs when one has the technology.

This struck me recently reading about Noir Siddiqui’s genetic pre-testing corporation, Orchid. Some 2300 genetic predispositions can be screened in embryos, ensuring maximum baby and parental happiness. Siddiqui is quite relaxed to figure out the morality after the event, as if somehow we would “be kind and rewind” if we sensed we missed a huge ethical problem with the tech:

I think this is something that society has been waiting for. For generations. So much had to develop in the history of humans for us to be able to get here. It’s up to us to decide the morality and how it’s used. It’s just data on embryos at the earliest possible stage.

Humans would make a name for themselves outside the parameters of God’s design for humans. God had identified and named humanity. He set their boundaries. Now, thanks to the technology, they could operate wildly outside their remit.

The famous painting of the tower, pictured above by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, has always fascinated me, and I have memories of a copy of it in the home of one of my grandmother’s.

What’s fascinating about the painting is that Bruegel rendered it theologically and sociologically accurate, rather than historically accurate. There’s no doubt that the Babel tower was a ziggurat, an ancient Near Eastern worship structure that was much more rudimentary in its design.

This is not that.

Bruegel’s rendition is a mash up of Roman and medieval structures. And the men overseeing the work to the left hand side of the painting are dressed in contemporaneous clothing to Bruegel.

But that’s the point he is making. Every generation is Babelish. It is the fallen human condition to take new materials and fashion them, not to give glory to God, but to give glory to the self. Breugel knew his theology. In that sense everything from the original Tower of Babel is Babel 2.0.

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