Soft Babel

 Soft Babel

Consider the words “man” and “woman.”

In scripture these are not flexible social constructs. They are creational categories given in the beginning, tied to embodiment, complementarity, and the Image of God. When a culture can no longer agree on what those words name, it becomes increasingly difficult to receive the passages that depend on them without first translating them into a newer framework. The translation is rarely neutral. It tends to smooth out or reverse the original force.

The same pattern appears with other load-bearing words: marriage, father, mother, truth, sin, repentance, even “God.” Once the referents drift, the sentences that use them begin to mean something else—or nothing precise at all.

This is not merely a loss of clarity. It is a loss of access. Scripture is not a collection of free-floating inspirational sentiments. It is speech from a God who speaks with intention, who creates by Word, and who expects His words to be received as they stand. When the receiving language has been hollowed or inverted, the original meaning becomes harder to recover without deliberate, almost archaeological effort. People still quote the verses, but they increasingly hear them through the new semantic filter.

The result is a kind of soft Babel: not that we suddenly cannot understand one another’s syllables, but that we no longer share enough stable meaning to be corrected by the same text.

There is a further irony. The original Babel judgment scattered people so they could not complete a unified project of reaching heaven on their own terms. The modern version of linguistic drift often serves a different but related project: the construction of a reality in which the Creator’s categories are optional. If “man” and “woman” can be redefined by will or feeling, then the authority of the One who made them male and female is quietly displaced. Language becomes a tool of self-definition rather than a medium of reception.

None of this means recovery is impossible. Scripture itself repeatedly calls people back to the plain sense of words, to the beginning, to what was spoken from the start. The Covenant of Christ (The Book of Mormon) is especially insistent on this—warning against those who “change the ordinance” and “break the everlasting covenant,” and emphasizing that God’s words do not pass away. The work of recovery requires humility before the text rather than mastery over it: letting the older meanings judge the newer ones, rather than the reverse.

Sin -changed meaning- begets sin begets sin begets sin until the original error is so distant as to not be remembered, until only the existing understanding remains to fuel the fire of conflict—whether internal or directed outward against one’s neighbor.

The deeper question is whether a people can continue to hear God while the shared language in which His speech was given is being systematically destabilized. History and scripture both suggest the answer is no—not indefinitely. At some point the gap between the divine utterance and the culture’s capacity to receive it becomes so wide that only a remnant still has ears to hear.

Signed

John The-Not-So-Beloved

Warm Light - Cold Shadow

Warm Light - Cold Shadow 

I’ve noticed that I cast a warm favorable light when I trust and a cold shadow when I don’t. And I’m fairly sure neither is right and I presume I’m not alone.

The light I throw is rarely pure. It gets filtered through my need, my loyalty, my shared history, or the quiet hope that this person will not fail me. Under that warm light, flaws soften. Motives are given the benefit of the doubt. I see the best possible version—sometimes a version that could never be lived up to.

When the shadow falls, it comes from a colder place in me. Once trust is withdrawn, the same person is seen through an entirely different lens. Every word is weighed for deceit. Every action is assumed to hide a darker purpose. The light that once flattered now refuses to touch them at all. What was once excused is now condemned; what was once invisible becomes the only thing visible.

Both views are incomplete.

Perhaps the clearest view of a man is from below—not from the pedestal once placed under him, nor from the pit later dug for him. From below he is seen as he actually stands: finite, limited, capable of both good and failure, bearing the same human weight we all carry. From that low place it becomes harder to mistake him for a god, and harder to curse him as a devil.

Scripture is relentless on this point. The Lord has never asked us to look for gods in men. He has asked us to look for the image of God in men—and to remember that the image is still being formed, still incomplete, still subject to the same temptations that work on all of us. When perfection is demanded of those trusted, they are set up for a fall that is almost inevitable. When no light is allowed to remain in those who have disappointed, the door is closed on the very mercy each of us will one day need.

I’m that man! Putting a pedestal beneath myself one moment for the good I see, and in the next, a voluntary leap from the pedestal into the pit I’ve dug for all the weakness and faults I know are there.

Warm light and cold shadow are both born of my own heart. The clearer sight is the one that refuses both extremes: that sees a man as a man, neither more nor less, and leaves the final judgment where it belongs—with the only One who sees without distortion.

Don’t be too hard, don’t be too soft.

Signed - 

John The-Not-So-Beloved