Tag: god

The Gods in Dust

Once none dared blaspheme their names—
Isis enthroned, Osiris of the underworld,
Amun-Ra blazing in the noon,
Zeus the thunderer, Hera august,
Athena who struck with spear,
Apollo of the lyre and light,
Artemis who loosed her arrows in the shadows of the wood.
Marduk who shattered the dragon,
Ishtar of love and war,
Baal the rider of clouds,
Dagon of the harvest, Chemosh of battle.
All received blood and incense,
bore the weight of kingdoms,
demanded fear.

But now—
their names are ink upon a scholar’s page,
cartoons in a schoolboy’s jest.
Their temples gape as hollow mouths,
stones tumbled like teeth in the earth.
Their rites are rumor,
their mysteries reconstruction,
their fires ashes, their echoes gone.

Behold Karnak, roofless to the sky;
Delphi, once the navel of the world,
silent but for the wind in the laurel.
Eleusis, where mysteries bound gods and men,
is rubble, its rites reduced to speculation.
Uruk, the wall-girt city,
mute in the desert.
Tenochtitlan, where once the sun fed on blood,
now paved by another empire’s stones.

Thus is man mocked by memory:
he built to house the eternal,
yet what he named eternal is gone.
The priest is forgotten with the god,
the hymn with the idol,
the worship with the fear.
All that was called everlasting—
proved mortal as dust.

Yet from these scattered stones, a truth emerges:
temples fall, names fade,
but the hunger endures.
Not the idol, but the yearning;
not the revelation carved in stone,
but the silence men cannot bear.

The divine was never in the image,
but in the need that made it.
This is the immortal truth:
that man longs,
and in the longing is closer to the eternal
than any god he made.

Yet beware:
for the gods that fed on blood
still feed—
only now in other names,
with other temples,
upon the lives of men.

Epic of Gaza

Proem

Weep, Angelic Host—sentinel Cherubim, laudific Seraphim—weep,
Recall, O Memory, the deeds of men most mean, their bitter striving;
Of those whose wrath, though born of dust, consumed the fields of nations,
Whose hands, unclean with envy, loosed the cry of widows and orphans.
From their hearts rose pride, and with their pride came hunger unbounded,
Till hearth and altar alike lay broken, the ploughshare shattered,
And souls unnumbered went down to the shadowy regions,
Leaving their fathers bereft, their children untended, their homes in ashes.

Thus was the earth made desolate, and Heaven itself grew weary;
For even the Seraphim, laudific, grew silent in their praising,
And even the Cherubim, sentinel, let fall their flaming vigil.
Yet still, O Memory, sing on, that generations yet unborn may tremble,
Lest pride unmeasured, and meanness cloaked in strength, rise once more,
And angelic hosts be called again to witness man’s undoing.

Gaza Before the Storm

Remember first how Gaza stood beside the ancient sea,
Her markets bright with oranges, her harbors filled with song,
Where fishermen cast nets at dawn, and children ran the shore,
And olive groves grew silver-green beneath the turning seasons.
The Great Omari lifted high its Byzantine dome,
Saint Porphyrius kept its vigil, fifteen centuries strong,
And in the evening hour of prayer, a thousand minarets
Sent voices skyward, weaving threads of worship into twilight.

Here was a city rooted deep, her stones drunk full of time,
Her people bound by blood and earth to this small patch of shore.
The old men sat in coffee shops, playing backgammon and speaking
Of harvests past, of children grown, of peace that might yet come.
But Memory keeps what was, before the storm clouds gathered,
Before the sky grew dark with iron, and the earth with ashes.

Gaza Besieged

Hear now, O Memory, after the angelic cry, the tale of sorrow:
How wrath was loosed upon Gaza, the walled and crowded city,
Where children clung to their mothers, and fathers kept vigil in hunger,
And the streets ran red with fire, the stones made to weep with blood.

For men most mean, in pride unmeasured, cast down their anger,
And the sky, once blue with doves, grew black with the smoke of ruin.
Hospitals groaned with the wounded, mosques lay shattered in silence;
The cry of the muezzin was drowned by the thunder of iron.
Women lifted their arms to heaven, crying for justice;
Infants wailed without milk, and the wells ran red with despair.

Thus did Gaza endure, as Ilium once by the Scamander,
A city besieged, its name to be sung in lamentation.
Yet not Troy alone, but Sarajevo’s bitter winters,
Stalingrad’s rubble, Warsaw’s ghetto walls—
All cities that have tasted wrath speak Gaza’s name as sister.

Catalogue of Grief

Sing the children whose laughter was severed in silence:
Sing Amal, whose curls were bright as dawn, now dust-shrouded;
Sing Yusuf, who carried a ball through the alleys, forever stilled;
Sing Miriam, with eyes like lamps, closed by the weight of rubble;
Sing Omar, who drew birds in the sand, his small hands silenced;
Sing Laila, who danced to her grandmother’s songs, now voiceless;
Sing Ahmed, six years old, who asked why the sky was angry.
These were the blossoms cut down, their springtime denied them,
Their games unfinished, their dreams unspoken, their tomorrow stolen.

Sing the mothers, whose voices rose in lamentation:
Sing Layla, who cried to the heavens, clutching fragments of cloth;
Sing Hanan, whose arms grew empty, rocking the air with sorrow;
Sing Fatima, who counted days by her children’s breathing;
Sing Mariam, who sang lullabies to graves of stone.
They were the pillars broken, their wombs turned to tombs of memory,
Their milk dried up, their cradle songs transformed to keening.

Sing the fathers, silent with grief, their faces carved from stone:
Sing Khalid, who once ploughed fields, now sifts through the ruins;
Sing Samir, who carried no sword, yet bore the weight of the fallen;
Sing Mahmoud, whose hands built homes, now dig for his buried;
Sing Hassan, who taught his son to read, now reads only headstones.
They were the oaks uprooted, their roots torn from the soil,
Their strong backs bent, their protecting arms made powerless.

Sing the city herself, Gaza, heart of the seashore:
Streets that once bustled with trade, now choked with ashes;
Mosques that lifted their domes to heaven, now shattered and open;
Hospitals that groaned with the wounded, their floors awash in blood;
Schools where children learned their letters, now rubble and memory;
Markets where oranges gleamed like suns, now dust and silence.
Gaza endures, yet her breath is ragged, her beauty in ruins.

The Heroes of Gaza

Yet sing also those who stood against the storm:

Sing Dr. Hussam, who would not leave his patients,
Operating by candlelight when the power failed,
His hands steady though the building shook with bombs.

Sing Mama Zahra, ninety years old,
Who sheltered twelve children not her own,
Sharing her last crust of bread among them,
Singing them to sleep with ancient lullabies.

Sing the teacher Amjad, who carved lessons in the dust,
Teaching children their letters beneath the rubble,
That learning might not die with the schools,
That hope might live though hope seemed dead.

Sing the young father Rashid, who dug with bloodied hands
For seventeen hours to free his neighbor’s child,
Though his own house lay in ruins,
Though his own losses called him home.

Sing the nurse Amal, who walked three miles each day
Through streets of glass and metal,
Carrying medicine to the wounded,
Her white coat bright as a flag of mercy.

These were the lights that would not be extinguished,
The flames that burned when all else was darkness,
The proof that goodness lives even in Hell,
That humanity endures though inhumanity rage.

The Silence of Nations

Yet where were the nations when Gaza called for aid?
The mighty kingdoms sat in their towers of glass,
Counting their gold, weighing their alliances,
While children starved beneath the rubble of their homes.

Some sent words like empty vessels, hollow condolences,
Others turned their faces away, as if not seeing
Could make the screaming stop, the dying disappear.
The halls of justice echoed only with procedure,
While Gaza bled, and Memory wrote their shameful silence.

Even the sea turned bitter, tasting ash and sorrow,
And dolphins fled those waters where the harbors burned.
Only the wind remained faithful, carrying the cries
Across the world, though men stopped up their ears
And closed their eyes, and voted for blindness.

Wrath of the Aggressors

Yet grief alone is not the tale, but wrath that bred it.

For men most mean, enthroned in pride, decreed destruction:
The Stone-faced King, whose tongue was sharpened with iron,
Who called fire down from heaven, and loosed it on the helpless.
The Golden-Maned Ruler, who sat upon distant waters,
Sending arms and gold, as though to purchase silence;
He bore the name of peacemaker, yet his hands were heavy with blood.

These were the princes of the age, their counsel clothed in falsehood,
And their decrees were bitter, sowing ashes in the earth.
They spoke of safety while they sowed destruction,
Of defense while they dealt death to the defenseless.
Their words were honey, but their works were gall,
And History will write their names in letters black as smoke.

The Voice of Gaza

Yet not in silence did Gaza bow, nor wholly in despair.
From the ruins rose a voice, steadfast as stone in the storm:

“We are the living, though the dust has covered our faces.
Our children sleep in the earth, yet their names burn bright as stars.
Break our houses, yet from rubble we rise speaking;
Cut down our olives, yet new shoots crack the stone.

You call us shadows, yet we cast longer darkness
Than your towers, and our darkness teaches light.
You name us forgotten, yet Memory keeps us close,
And angels inscribe our suffering in letters of gold.

Count our dead if you can number the grains of sand;
Measure our sorrow if you can drain the sea.
We have drunk deep of anguish, yet we are not broken;
We have walked through the valley of death, yet we breathe.

O sons of men most mean, your wrath is but smoke on the wind.
You have the fire, but we have the ashes, and ashes endure.
You have the sword, but we have the word, and the word is eternal.
Know this: though you bury us, we shall rise in the telling,
For the earth itself whispers our names, and will not forget.

And if the nations turn their faces away, still we stand,
For Gaza is not undone, though her walls lie fallen.
We are the olive trees that grow from stones,
We are the songs that survive the singers,
We are the light that shines in darkness,
And darkness has never overcome us.”

The Desecrations

Nor were the sanctuaries spared, nor the places of the Most High.
The destroyers struck at temples, their minarets broken in silence;
They shattered the churches, where lamps once trembled in vigil,
Icons dashed in dust, crosses cast down in fire.
Thus was prayer silenced, whether in Arabic chant or in hymnal;
The faithful fled, yet the stones themselves groaned in lament.

And the olive trees, those elders of the earth, were uprooted;
Ancient roots torn from soil that had drunk the blood of generations.
Branches once heavy with fruit lay scorched upon the ground,
And the groves, where fathers had walked with their sons, stood barren.
No psalm was heard, no murmur of leaves in the evening;
Only the wind through ruins, whispering sorrow to heaven.

Even the dead found no peace in their appointed places;
Graves were torn open, bones scattered to air,
Ancestors made homeless, their rest disturbed.
For wrath respects neither the living nor the sleeping,
Neither the newly born nor the long-buried,
Neither the sacred nor the profane.

Catalogue of the Broken Sanctuaries

Sing the names of holy places undone:
The Great Omari Mosque, Byzantine-born,
Heart of Gaza’s Old City, December-felled;
Saint Porphyrius, fifth-century stone,
Twice-struck shelter, sixteen souls entombed beneath its ancient walls.

Khalid bin al-Walid Mosque, November’s ruin,
Al-Riad Mosque, March’s bitter fall,
Bani Saleh Mosque, August’s dust,
Yassin Mosque, struck in al-Shati’s crowded camp,
Ibn Uthman too, its centuries silenced.

Count them: of twelve hundred and forty-four mosques,
More than a thousand scarred by fire and iron,
Nine hundred leveled utterly, their prayers cut short,
Their faithful scattered like leaves before the storm.

Graveyards forty out of sixty struck,
Twenty-two erased from the earth,
Bones scattered to air, ancestors made homeless.
Palaces broken, markets burned, bathhouses unroofed,
Even Anthedon Harbor, Roman gateway, flattened into the sea.

Museums looted, libraries obliterated,
Memory itself made to bleed, the archives set aflame.
For they would kill not only the living,
But the memory of the living,
The records of their being,
The proof they ever were.

The Lamentation Chorus

The Mothers of Gaza cry:
“O children, blossoms cut before the fruit,
We held you in our arms, now we hold only ashes.
Your laughter is buried beneath the stones of our city,
And our breasts are dry, our songs turned into wailing.
Yet still we sing your names like prayers,
And still we dream your dreams unfinished.”

The Fathers of Gaza groan:
“Our fields are ruined, our ploughs shattered,
The olive trees uprooted, the roots torn from the soil.
We walk among graves unguarded,
Where bones lie scattered, denied even silence.
Yet still we remember the taste of our olives,
And still we plant hope in the ashes.”

The Faithful lament:
“Where are the mosques that once trembled with prayer?
The Great Omari lies fallen, Ibn Uthman silenced,
Saint Porphyrius struck, its saints entombed anew.
Our lamps are dark, our chants broken in the smoke.
Yet still our hearts are temples,
And still our prayers rise to heaven.”

The Children’s Voices rise:
“We who were silenced while learning to speak,
We who were buried while learning to walk,
We who were taken while learning to love—
We are not gone, though our bodies lie broken.
We live in the tears of our mothers,
We live in the dreams of our fathers,
We live in the songs that remember us,
And death has no power over song.”

The Angels answer:
“We weep with you, O Gaza;
For sentinel Cherubim have loosed their flaming swords in sorrow,
And laudific Seraphim, once ceaseless in praise,
Cover their faces in grief, and their hallelujahs are hushed.
Yet know that every tear is counted,
Every name is written in light,
And what was destroyed on earth
Stands whole in the halls of eternity.”

The Chorus of Gaza cries together:
“Who shall remember us if not the stones?
Who shall keep our names if not the dust?
If the nations turn away their eyes,
Then let the heavens bear witness, and let Memory sing forever.
For we are Gaza, and Gaza endures,
We are the voice that will not be silenced,
We are the story that must be told,
We are the love that conquers death.”

Catalogue of the Slain

Sing, O Memory, of the dead, the multitude unnumbered,
For Gaza has given sixty thousand souls and more to the grave.
Not warriors alone, but children in their play,
Mothers in their shelter, fathers in their vigil,
The aged bent with years, the newborn scarcely named.

Count fifty-eight thousand more wounded,
Their bodies torn, their spirits scarred in silence.
Two thousand struck while seeking bread,
Gathering in hope of relief, yet felled by fire.
Three hundred perished of hunger, seven and ten children,
Their lips dry, their bellies hollow, their cries unheard by the nations.

Even when truces were spoken, the killing continued,
Ten thousand more consumed like chaff in flame.
Who can reckon those incinerated, buried under stone and steel,
Whose names are known only to God,
Whose faces are forgotten by man
But remembered by eternity?

A leaked report from the destroyer’s own hand
Confessed the truth they would hide:
Four of every five were innocents,
The harmless marked as enemies,
The helpless slain as foes.
Thus did wrath devour the lambs of Gaza,
And the angels wept, inscribing their names in light.

The Judgment of Yahweh

Then did the heavens part, as once above Sinai,
And Yahweh Himself descended, wrapped in cloud and flame,
The Ancient of Days, whose voice shook the foundations,
Before whom cherubim veil their faces, and seraphim fall silent.

He brought forth the scales of ultimate justice,
Vast as the firmament, terrible as truth,
And weighed the works of men most mean:
Their bombs and decrees, their gold and iron,
Their speeches of defense while dealing death.

“I have seen this before,” spoke the Voice that split the Red Sea,
“The marking of a people for destruction,
The sealing of their fate in chambers of decision,
The systematic starving, the calculated killing.
Did I not hear the cry from burning ghettos?
Did I not see the smoke from crematoria?”

In the other pan He placed Gaza’s slain,
The bones of children, the tears of mothers,
And with them, the ghosts of all genocide’s victims—
Warsaw and Treblinka, Armenia and Rwanda.

The scales tilted under genocide’s weight,
And the voice of the Almighty thundered:

“Genocide! I name it what it is.
You who survived the furnaces of Europe,
How could you kindle furnaces for others?

I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
But I am also the God of Hagar and Ishmael.
I freed slaves from Egypt,
But I will not bless those who enslave others.

These deeds are genocide, and I have weighed them.
These rulers stand condemned, their glory is ash.
Justice will come, though justice tarry long,
And every tear will be counted,
Every life will be avenged.
Genocide!”

The Promise of Memory

Yet this is not the end, O sons of earth,
For Memory does not merely mourn but promises.

As from the ashes of the phoenix rises flame,
As from winter’s death comes spring’s green resurrection,
So from Gaza’s anguish shall come forth
A testimony that shall not be silenced.

The children who were slain shall live in song,
The mothers who were silenced shall speak through poetry,
The fathers who were broken shall stand tall in story,
And Gaza herself, though wounded, shall endure
Until justice rolls down like waters,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.

For this is the promise Memory makes:
That suffering witnessed becomes sacred,
That innocence destroyed becomes indestructible,
That love murdered becomes immortal,
And truth, though buried, always rises.

Epilogue

So sing, O Memory, lest silence fall and truth be buried.
Let cherubim guard the names, let seraphim whisper them in praise.
Let the children of Gaza, though slain, rise again in song,
And let the nations know that what was destroyed endures in remembrance.

For stone may be shattered, but the word cannot be silenced,
And ashes speak, though the fire consume them.
The olive trees shall grow again from their ancient roots,
The mosques shall be rebuilt, more beautiful than before,
The children shall play once more in streets made clean,
And Gaza shall rise, as morning rises from the night.

This is the epic of Gaza, written in tears and blood,
In ashes and in starlight, in sorrow and in hope.
Let it be read when tyrants sleep secure,
Let it be sung when justice seems to slumber,
Let it be remembered when the world forgets—

Sing, O Memory, of Gaza.

Weep, Angelic Host—sentinel Cherubim, laudific Seraphim—weep.

The Last Witness: Unity, Confusion, and the Misreading of Babel

Donald S. Yarab

“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words… And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower… lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'”
— Genesis 11:1-4

“Look, they are one people, and they have all one language… nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”
— Genesis 11:6

Escher's Tower of Babel (1928)
Tower of Babel by M.C. Escher. Woodcut, 1928.
Escher, commenting on the work, stated: “Some of the builders are white and others black. The work is at a standstill because they are no longer able to understand one another. Seeing as the climax of the drama takes place at the summit of the tower which is under construction, the building has been shown from above as though from a bird’s eye view.”

The last man to descend from the Tower of Babel after language was confounded carried with him a memory that the theologians would spend centuries trying to erase. Dust-covered and thirsty, standing bewildered among companions now made strangers, he remembered what it had been like to build together. He remembered the shared mortar, the common purpose, the simple joy of raising something greater than any one of them could accomplish alone.

He remembered their fear—not pride, but fear. The fear of being scattered, of losing one another, of becoming strangers in a vast and empty world. And he remembered their response: “Come, let us build.” Not “Come, let us conquer heaven,” but “Come, let us remain together.”

Yet somehow, in the millennia that followed, their unity would be called sin. Their cooperation would be named rebellion. Their fear of scattering would be recast as prideful ambition. The very virtues that had bound them—brotherhood, shared purpose, mutual aid—would be transformed by interpreters into vices deserving divine punishment.

But the last man remembered. And his memory betrays the tradition we were taught.

A child, gathering stones with siblings to build a fort in the backyard, does not think of rebellion. The impulse to create together, to make something shared and lasting, springs from the deepest wells of human nature. It is the sacred reaching toward we that lifts us beyond the isolation of I. When children say “Let’s build something,” they echo the first and purest impulse of community itself.

How then can it be imagined that the Divine—source of all communion, all love—would greet humanity’s first great act of cooperation not with blessing but with violence? How could the natural longing to remain together, to build something lasting, to resist the entropy of scattering, be met not with approval but with the very scattering they feared?

It cannot be so. It is not the divine who pronounced guilt over unity; it is man.

The doctrine that Babel represents sinful pride emerges not from the text itself but from human artifice. It is born of fear—fear of unity that cannot be controlled, fear of cooperation that bypasses authority, fear of communities that dare to build without permission from those who claim dominion over building.

For what is the story of Babel if not the story of the first We? The natural longing to remain together, to resist isolation, to create something greater than the sum of individual parts—this was not the rebellion of prideful beings but the organic unfolding of community itself. To portray this reaching as disobedience is to misread the very nature of human fellowship.

The Genesis narrative itself frames the matter plainly. The builders are not described as wicked. They are not blasphemers or tyrants. They are simply people who share a language and a purpose. Their stated aim is modest and moving: to build a city and tower “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

This is not hubris. This is the cry of community itself—the recognition that separation means death, that scattering means the end of the shared life they have known. They build not to reach heaven but to remain earthbound together. Not to transcend the human condition but to honor it through cooperation.

When the divine voice observes, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” there is no anger in the words. There is something else—perhaps apprehension, perhaps wonder, perhaps even a kind of sorrow. The tone is not of wrath but of recognition: unity makes all things possible.

But perhaps this “divine voice” is not divine at all. Perhaps it is the voice of the writer, generations later, trying to make theological sense of a catastrophe that was entirely human in origin. Perhaps the real Babel was not a moment when God intervened, but when human beings—through political fracture, resource conflict, or the machinations of those who feared unified peoples—engineered their own scattering. Perhaps the “confusion of tongues” was not miraculous punishment but the natural result of division, distrust, and the deliberate sowing of misunderstanding.

The Last Man would have known the difference. He would have remembered not divine intervention, but human failure. Not the voice of judgment from heaven, but the whispers of those who benefited from division. He would have seen how cooperation became suspect, how shared purpose was undermined, how the fear of remaining together was replaced by the greater fear of those who might control them if they remained apart.

Later theological traditions, particularly within Christianity, would recast this moment as divine judgment against human pride. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XVI), framed Babel as the archetype of the earthly city, writing that the builders “erected this tower against the Lord, and so gave expression to their impious pride; and justly was their wicked intention punished by God.” He further interpreted their motive as believing “they could avoid a future flood (as if anything could be too high for God!)” (Tractates on John 6.10.2). Augustine thought that ‘babel’ meant ‘confusion’: it is characteristic of the earthly city, he said, that there is no consistent moral or religious teaching, only a babble of conflicting voices. Medieval theologians deepened this interpretation, with Isidore of Seville’s influential Etymologies helping to establish the framework where the confusion of languages was seen as divinely designed punishment for human arrogance. Augustine had already helped establish the tradition that 72 languages resulted from Babel’s confusion (The City of God XVI 6), and this numerical framework became standard in medieval interpretations. Bede the Venerable employed allegorical interpretation methods that turned Babel into a moral allegory, while later Reformation thinkers would see scattered tongues as evidence of human fallenness.

But this interpretive tradition serves power more than truth. For if the scattering was actually human-engineered—the result of political manipulation, resource conflicts, or the deliberate sowing of division by those who feared unified peoples—then claiming it was divinely ordained becomes a theological cover-up. If unity without proper authority is called sinful, then those who claim to speak for proper authority become indispensable. If human fellowship is made suspect, then mediated fellowship—through church, through state, through hierarchy—becomes the only legitimate path to community.

Thus the interpreters of tradition did not just sanctify separation—they concealed its human origins. They made peace with estrangement by calling it divine will. They turned a human tragedy into a divine necessity, a wound into a cure.

The last man at Babel would not have recognized this version of his story. He would have remembered the morning when work began, when neighbors called to neighbors across the plain of Shinar: “Come, let us make bricks. Come, let us build.” He would have remembered the satisfaction of shared labor, the jokes passed from hand to hand with the mortar, the songs that rose from many voices into one.

He would have remembered their dream: not to storm heaven, but to remain together. Not to challenge the divine, but to honor the human bonds that felt, themselves, like gifts from beyond.

And he would have remembered how it ended. Not with divine fire or celestial intervention, but with human scheming. The whispered warnings about “those people” over there. The rumors of resource hoarding. The gradual erosion of trust. The political calculations of those who saw more advantage in a scattered people than a unified one. The slow poison of suspicion that made neighbor distrust neighbor, until the common language itself began to fracture—not by miracle, but by design.

The misreading of Babel has shaped our politics, our theology, our imagination for millennia. It has made us suspicious of cooperation, fearful of unity, comfortable with division. It has taught us that coming together is dangerous, that shared purpose is prideful, that the stranger—created not by divine decree but by human manipulation—is properly strange.

But more than that, it has concealed the human responsibility for our fractures. It has allowed us to blame God for what we did to ourselves. It has made us forget that Babel was not divine judgment but human failure—and that the story was written to make the perpetrators seem like agents of divine will.

Under the weight of this interpretation, we have learned to distrust the very impulses that might heal our brokenness. We have been taught that our longing for true community is suspect, that our desire to build together is rebellious, that our resistance to scattering is sinful.

But the text itself whispers another truth: that the builders were afraid of becoming strangers to one another. That their tower was not an assault on heaven but an anchor against forgetting. That what was lost at Babel was not obedience, but fellowship—and that the loss was engineered by human hands, then sanctified by human interpreters who found it useful to claim that God wanted division.

And perhaps what was broken by human manipulation might yet be mended by human recognition—by refusing to let the theological cover story stand unchallenged.

Man is not innately proud. Man is innately communal. Born into a world too vast for any individual to comprehend or inhabit alone, humanity’s first impulse is not toward dominion but toward fellowship—the need to share the burden and wonder of existence, to say “we” in a cosmos that otherwise echoes only “I.”

Community, then, is not a luxury; it is the ground of survival. It is the blessed recognition that no one person contains enough wisdom, strength, or love to make full sense of being human. Without it, there would be no shared labor, no common song, no building of anything that might outlast the brief span of individual life.

The theologians, in their haste to impose hierarchy where partnership had flourished, mistook cooperation for conspiracy. They mistook the reaching toward “we” for rebellion against divine order. But community is not sin; it is the evidence of our created nature, the signature of beings made not for isolation but for fellowship.

To say “Come, let us build” is to live as we were made to live: together, sharing the work, sharing the dream, sharing the hope that what we make together might matter more than what any of us could make alone.

The first great act of building was not a crime against the divine. It was the first true expression of humanity: the confused, hopeful, vulnerable community daring to create something lasting in a world of scattering.

In our cooperation, then, we find not our fall but our calling. Not our sin but our salvation. For to say “Come, let us build” is to begin the work of home—not a tower reaching toward heaven, but a community reaching toward one another.

The sacred path is not upward but inward—into fellowship, into shared purpose, into the endless possibility of what human beings might accomplish when they refuse to remain strangers.

The last man at Babel, climbing down from the ruins, carried with him more than dust and disappointment. He carried the memory of what it felt like to build together. And that memory, fragile as it was, held within it the seed of every community that would ever rise again from the ashes of confusion.

For the impulse to build together, like the impulse to question, is indestructible. Scattered, perhaps. Confused, certainly. But never finally lost.

The tower was abandoned. But the dream of building together endures.

And the question remains: who broke us apart, and who benefits from keeping us scattered? The Last Man knows. His memory threatens not just bad theology, but the very structures of power that require our division to survive.

Perhaps that is why his voice has been so carefully silenced for so long.

Credo Quia Gustavi: A Theology of Garlic

By Donald S. Yarab

Vincent van Gogh, Red Cabbages and Garlic (1887)
Oil on canvas, 50 cm × 64.5 cm (20 in × 25.4 in)
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Garlic, I proffer, is a proof for the existence of God.

This is no idle remark, but a sincere offering—a theophanic gesture. The proposal is made in good faith and deserves to be received in kind. For garlic, humble yet exalted, reveals more than flavor; it unveils mystery.

Not through syllogism, but through savor. Not by argument, but by aroma. It is theology by way of the tongue and nose, where the sacred reveals itself not in thunder, but in the quiet sizzle of clove meeting oil. This is not mere indulgence. This is revelation.

Let us consider, then, a brief Credo in four parts:

1. The Argument from Delight
Garlic transforms. It does not merely flavor—it exalts. Beans become feast, bread becomes blessing. That a bulb, buried in earth and gnarled like a relic, should yield such joy when crushed or roasted is, in itself, an argument for a benevolent architect.

2. The Argument from Simplicity and Complexity
Each clove is a marvel—humble in form, abundant in gift: it offers flavor, healing, preservation, and, in many traditions, spiritual protection against malignant forces. What mind, save one both divine and wise, would endow so much in so little?

3. The Argument from Devotion
Revered across cultures—French, Chinese, Italian, Greek—garlic is not bound by nation or creed. It is a kind of aromatic ecumenism. What else commands such near-universal reverence without edict or doctrine?

4. The Argument from Absence
To taste a dish where garlic should have been is to feel its absence as void. It is theology by negation—apophatic cuisine. Like divine silence, its absence speaks volumes.

Thus we say, without irony:
Credo quia gustavi.
I believe because I have tasted.

And behold, it was very good.

When Cruelty Becomes Virtue: The Erosion of Soul and Society

The Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré (1865)
The Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré (1865)

Author’s Note

This essay, The Void at the Heart, is presented as a contemplative meditation on the moral and spiritual collapse visible in aspects of contemporary governance and public life. It is a deliberately focused reflection, tracing the descent from cruelty in action to the corruption of thought, to the inversion of traditional values, and finally to the eclipse of the soul itself.

This essay may, in future, be expanded into a fuller monograph-length work. Such a work would likely incorporate historical and contemporary examples, address counterarguments, consider cultural issues, and distinguish more sharply between causes and symptoms of decay. For now, however, I offer this essay as a completed meditation in its own right—a starting point for further reflection.

The Void at the Heart

On Cruelty, the Collapse of Reason, and the Eclipse of the Soul

There is a void at the heart of the soul, a place where the ordinary bounds of morality and ethical consideration seem to collapse into nothingness. It is not merely that questionable policies are advanced—that has ever been the case in human governance—but rather that their implementation is accompanied by a conspicuous and grotesque relish for cruelty. Even if one were to suspend judgment upon the legitimacy of the policies themselves, the manner of their enforcement betrays a deeper and more troubling decay: a delight in the infliction of pain.

Deportation of unauthorized aliens, for instance, is not approached as an unfortunate necessity carried out with solemnity and regret. It is heralded as a triumph, an occasion for rejoicing, even as it often rips apart families, sunders years of labor and stability, and leaves children disoriented and/or abandoned. Similarly, the mass termination of public servants and contractors—individuals who dedicated themselves to fields such as public health, education, consumer protection, and law enforcement—is not seen as a sorrowful consequence of political/policy change or fiscal concerns, but is rather celebrated with an air of gleeful vindictiveness. Grants and subsidies intended for the most vulnerable, from students to farmers, are not merely ended; they are rescinded with evident gleeful satisfaction, as though deprivation itself were a moral good.

Even those nearing completion of their educational journeys, standing on the threshold of careers that might benefit society, are not spared. Educational visas are canceled without warning or cause, months or even weeks before graduation. Opportunities are crushed underfoot. Dreams are shattered not as a side effect of some broader administrative goal, but seemingly as an end in themselves, an assertion that the suffering of others is righteous and overdue.

This spirit of cruelty is defended and magnified through a rhetoric that frames suffering as deserved, earned, or insufficiently severe. The pain of others is no longer a regrettable cost, but an instrument of moral theater: those who suffer are cast as villains, their misfortunes paraded as proof of divine or civic justice. In such a worldview, mercy is weakness, empathy is betrayal, and the infliction of pain is a form of virtue.

There is a profound difference between enacting necessary policies with reluctant firmness and celebrating the devastation they cause. A just society may impose burdens, but it ought never to rejoice in doing so. When joy is found in the destruction of livelihoods, when cheers rise at the deportation of neighbors, when applause greets the impoverishment of fellow citizens, something foundational has been lost. The wound is not merely political; it is spiritual.

The embrace of cruelty as a public virtue hollows out the soul of a nation. It numbs the collective conscience, distorts the notion of justice, and substitutes vindictiveness for principle. Over time, the society that delights in the suffering of others does not merely lose its victims; it loses itself. It becomes a cold and pitiless machine, capable of great power but incapable of true greatness, capable of order but incapable of meaning.

If the celebration of cruelty corrupts action and spirit, it inevitably corrupts thought as well. The human mind, which depends upon honesty and openness to discern the world aright, cannot remain untouched by the moral decay of the soul.

The Eclipse of Reason

The celebration of cruelty does not remain confined to the sphere of action; it metastasizes into the realm of thought itself. When a society exalts the suffering of the vulnerable and frames mercy as weakness, it necessarily distorts its ability to process information honestly. Truth ceases to be measured by coherence, evidence, or fidelity to reality. Instead, it is judged by its conformity to the prevailing narratives of contempt, fear, hatred, or greed.

Thus, expertise—whether scientific, legal, historical, or journalistic—is no longer respected as a necessary guide to sound judgment. It becomes suspect by its very nature if it fails to mirror the animosities of the moment. Scientists who warn of ecological degradation, public health crises, or technological risks are dismissed as conspirators or ideologues. Legal scholars who point to constitutional violations or abuses of authority are castigated as partisan agitators. Historians who trace the patterns of injustice, violence, or repression are branded as enemies of national pride. Journalists who seek to uncover uncomfortable truths are denounced as purveyors of “fake news,” their integrity impugned simply because they refuse to tailor their findings to the dominant ideological climate.

The citizenry themselves, infected by the ethos of cruelty, become willing participants in this willful blindness. They refuse to hear, to consider, to weigh, or to deliberate. Instead, they declare all sources outside their ideological fortress to be corrupt, unreliable, or part of some imagined conspiracy. Knowledge itself becomes an object of scorn, and expertise is equated with betrayal. The very faculties that distinguish the informed citizen—the ability to discern evidence, to listen with patience, to reason without rancor—atrophy and are replaced by reflexive suspicion and tribal affirmation.

Orwell, ever the grim prophet, would recognize the phenomenon with bitter familiarity. In his imagined dystopias, the manipulation of language, the corruption of thought, and the triumph of ideology over reality are not the consequences of brute force alone, but of a populace that chooses to believe falsehoods because those falsehoods are more comforting—or more satisfying—than the difficult demands of truth. Ignorance is strength, he wrote, capturing the dark alchemy by which the renunciation of reason is transmuted into a perverse kind of certainty.

It is not merely that ideology colors perception; it replaces perception altogether. Information is no longer evaluated according to standards of credibility or methodology, but according to its utility in reinforcing contempt for the foreigner, the minority, the poor, or the vulnerable. If facts threaten to humanize the other, they are rejected. If scholarship suggests the necessity of compassion or restraint, it is denounced as corruption. Only that which fuels resentment is permitted to be heard; only that which magnifies grievance is deemed “true.”

In such a climate, dialogue becomes impossible. The very idea of dialogue presupposes a willingness to listen, to admit complexity, to concede error. But where cruelty reigns, these are forbidden virtues. In their place stand slogans, shouted endlessly into a void that no longer seeks understanding but only echoes its own bitter triumphs.

In such a climate, governance itself grows chaotic and erratic, not by accident but by design. Policies are proclaimed and abandoned with little coherence; programs are implemented or canceled with open disregard for planning, expertise, or consequence. The instability is treated not as a failure, but as a virtue: a sign of disruption, toughness, authenticity. Yet beneath the slogans, the disorder corrodes trust, hollows out institutions, and leaves citizens adrift in a landscape where no promise endures and no framework holds. It is a cruelty not merely of action, but of confusion—a destabilization that magnifies alienation and feeds the collapse of both thought and community.

Yet even this collapse of thought is but a precursor to a deeper betrayal: the corruption of the very values that once defined and ennobled a people.

The Inversion of Values

As cruelty becomes a public virtue and ideology supplants reason, the final and most insidious transformation takes place: the subversion and inversion of traditional values themselves. The outward forms and labels of religion, civic duty, and ethical conduct may be preserved, but their substantive meanings are hollowed out and replaced by their very opposites. Language itself is corrupted; words once signifying aspiration, mercy, and justice now serve as empty vessels, bearing meanings recognizable only as antonyms of their epistemological truths.

Faith, once the call to humility before the divine and charity toward one’s fellow man, is distorted into a weapon of exclusion and punishment. Love of neighbor becomes conditional, subject to ideological conformity; compassion is reserved for the in-group alone, while hatred of the stranger is sanctified as a form of righteousness. The prophets and founders who once preached repentance, mercy, and love are invoked by those who trample upon their teachings, their sacred words reinterpreted to bless cruelty as strength and vindictiveness as virtue.

Civic values fare no better. Patriotism, once the measured love of one’s country expressed through service, sacrifice, and the protection of rights, degenerates into a shrill and defensive chauvinism. The rule of law, once understood as a shield for the weak and a restraint upon the strong, is twisted into a blunt instrument to punish enemies and protect the powerful. Freedom, once the delicate balance between personal liberty and communal responsibility, is redefined as the license to oppress, to dominate, to revel without shame in the suffering of others.

Even the ethical precepts that ground common life—the golden rule, the dignity of work, the sanctity of truth—are inverted. Do unto others becomes do unto others first, lest they do unto you; the dignity of labor is reserved for some and withheld from others based on arbitrary categories of race, origin, or ideology; truth itself becomes malleable, no longer a standard to which men must conform, but a tool to be wielded, bent, or abandoned as expediency demands.

In this bleak mirror-world, tradition becomes little more than pageantry—a hollow ritual masking a profound spiritual betrayal. The ancient words are mouthed, the venerable ceremonies performed, but their meaning is lost. Their light has been inverted into darkness, their call to transcendence replaced by a shout of tribal triumph. What was once sacred has become profane, and the keepers of the tradition are blind to their own apostasy.

Yet the descent does not end even there. It reaches further downward, to the degradation of the individual soul itself.

The Final Descent

Ultimately, the mind infected by cruelty and blinded by ideology forgets how to think, how to reason, how to love. The soul, once the wellspring of compassion, imagination, and truth-seeking, is lost. What remains is a hollow creature, a being still outwardly human but inwardly diminished, descending toward an animalistic existence governed only by base and grotesque instincts.

No longer illuminated by the light of reason, no longer stirred by the love of others or the awe of the divine, such a being reverts to the raw appetites of dominance, fear, rage, and self-preservation. The faculties that once elevated humanity—the search for truth, the capacity for self-sacrifice, the impulse toward mercy—atrophy and rot. What once distinguished man as a creature formed in the image of the divine is obscured beneath layers of suspicion, resentment, and brutality.

In such a state, crassness replaces dignity, and rudeness masquerades as strength. The subtleties of manners, the graces of dialogue, and the silent obligations owed to neighbor and stranger alike are discarded as burdensome relics of a now-despised civilization. Material success becomes the sole remaining measure of worth, and individual gratification the only recognized good. The broader community—once the nurturing ground of the self—becomes either invisible or hostile, perceived only as an impediment to personal appetite or ambition.

Alienation takes root, first unnoticed, then unchallenged, feeding upon itself. Having severed the ties that bind individuals to each other through mutual respect, shared memory, and common purpose, society decays into a landscape of lonely, embittered selves, suspicious of all and merciful to none. This alienation colors every interaction with a thin, toxic miasma: a pervasive bitterness, a readiness to assume the worst, a ceaseless litany of grievance against an imagined host of enemies.

The community, too, begins to crumble. No society can endure when its members are ruled by suspicion rather than trust, hatred rather than fraternity, cruelty rather than justice. Institutions falter, not because they are attacked from without, but because the very spirit that once animated them has fled.

Yet the gravest tragedy is not merely societal collapse, but the debasement of the individual soul. Each man or woman who abandons thought for slogan, love for contempt, truth for expedience, does more than wound the body politic; they desecrate the image of the divine that resides within.

Thus, the moral and ethical void at the heart of the soul becomes complete. And from that void, no nation, no civilization, no human heart emerges unscathed.

Epilogue: The Faint Memory of Light

Yet even amidst the ruin, a faint memory endures.

The divine image, though battered and obscured, is never wholly extinguished. Buried beneath the ash of cruelty and the rubble of falsehood, there remains a spark—a silent witness to the soul’s higher calling. It is not easily rekindled. It demands humility where pride has reigned, mercy where vengeance has triumphed, courage where fear has prevailed.

The path back is arduous and uncertain, for it requires the infected soul to remember that it has forgotten; it requires a people to repent not merely of actions, but of the passions that animated them. It requires that tradition be not merely repeated but restored, that truth be not merely spoken but once again loved, that reason be not merely used but honored.

If such a reawakening is to come, it will come quietly at first, as all true renewals do—not in thunderous proclamations, but in the whispered refusal to hate, the silent act of mercy, the solitary pursuit of truth in a world grown hostile to it. From these small and stubborn acts, unseen and unsung, a civilization might yet be reborn.

But if not, then the void will deepen, and the ruins will spread, and future generations will wonder at how lightly men once abandoned what was most precious: not wealth, nor power, nor comfort, but the light of mind and soul that marks the human being as more than a beast among beasts.

The choice remains, as it always has, hidden in the quiet precincts of each heart.