Tower of Babel
Article
Tower of Babel is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 17, 2023 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The same with most Bible stories (the Tower of Babel”; “replica of the Tower of Babel”. It most often appears alongside Peter Singer, Aaron Peskin, Abel.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 17, 2023
- Last seen: April 04, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Peter Singer (2 shared issues)
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- Aaron Peskin (1 shared issues)
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- Abel (1 shared issues)
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- ACLU (1 shared issues)
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- Adam and Eve (1 shared issues)
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- AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis (1 shared issues)
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- Algernon (1 shared issues)
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- alt-right (1 shared issues)
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- Amanda Askell (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Sullivan (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But Girard lost me with the part about the myths. Most pagan myths have nothing to do with the single-victim process (eg labors of Hercules, Jason and the Golden Fleece, rape of Persephone, the Iliad, the Trojan Horse, the Odyssey, etc, etc, etc). The same with most Bible stories (Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Ten Plagues, the Ten Commandments, etc). It kind of seems like the sort of thing where Freud can claim all myths are about castration. There are lots of myths, and they’re about lots of things. “Person does bad thing, the gods collectively punish humanity, then once we get rid of him the collective punishment stops” is certainly one trope. But it’s not hard to fathom why a primitive community stricken by a plague might think God was punishing them for some iniquity. And if I haven’t committed iniquity lately, and you haven’t committed iniquity lately, it must be some particular bad guy who needs to be stopped.
3: A fundamentalist Christian theme park in Kentucky plans to build a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel. You might think “wait, this is the opposite of what the Bible wants you to do”, but they have a blog post explaining why they disagree: