"Yes, I know, but Babel saw people divided by language. "-Clare

Yes, I know this, maybe everyone spoke the same language at the time, who knows?

But  the fact is they were separated, that's the point.Why? Because God seen what eventually would happen if there were no divisions among man and what he was capable of doing, mainly an affront to God's authority.

And once the language barrier was established, man went his separate ways into the corners of the earth where he eventually established various separate and distinct civilizations. And this is where the different cultures and ethnicities have sprung from, each with it's own unique customs and heritage and language.

And most of all race. It only makes sense that if you go back in time, the same people who were able to communicate freely amongst themselves were also able to bond together, thrive and procreate, in another words, to start families, communities and eventually nations. And that's where nationalities come from, nations.

But it all begins with the language and communication.

So if God "confused "the tongues he was in effect separating "races" that eventually sprang from the different languages. That is really the genesis of all ethnicities, cultures and races. Language. It's the glue that holds a people together.

So it was God's will a long time ago to keep the planet full of separate and distinct groups of people. Not some kind one world order and race.

"I am not a multiculturalist"-Clare

I beg to differ.

" Race and culture are not coterminous."

As a matter of fact, they usually are. Although this is not an absolute.

The problem is, when you have too much of one and not the other, soon both will become extinct. Show me a civilization that has endured this over the long haul and still exists, guess what, you can't.

Good word though......" coterminous".  :rolleyes:

"  Catholic culture is for everyone."

And your point is?

"I'm talking about the banner of the Mystical Body, not of man."

Again, what is your point?

"As I said, Babel saw division into different languages. If you don't consider it irrelevant, why don't you object to people of different nations, within the same race, mixing?

Again, you are obfuscating the issue, similar race trumps national borders, especially these days. As far as the Babel story, go back to what I wrote about how the different races came about from different tongues at one time. This is not true so much today. Thanks to multiculturalism and miscegenation.

"As I've said, many times, I'm not a multiculturalist."

I'm not buying it. Well, in the least, you approve mass miscegenation and are ambivalent with the eradication of the lighter races. Ethnic genocide is no big deal to your type, as a matter of fact you view it as "God's will" when you damn know well it is because of an insane liberal minded agenda and the leftist, commie mentality that are determined to do just that, genocide groups of races.

Clare, you write of language being apparently more important than race & give the example of Irishmen & Germans speaking mutually unintelligible languages, despite their racial similarity &c. This was not always the case. In ancient times, immediately after the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, the Indo-European peoples all spoke the same language, called Proto-Indo-European by philologers. It was only over the course of centuries that dialects of this original language diverged into the main indo-european language families that we know today, Romanic, Germanic, Balto-Slavonic & Hellenic. One can still see many similarities even today. Compare the words sister, Schwester (German) & sestra (Russian), or the Latin domus (house) & the Russian dom. There are many more such examples. The Germanic languages for instance, over time changed the initial p in many proto-indo-european words to an f, thus we have Vater (German), vader (Dutch) & father, whereas in Latin it is Pater, from which derive padre, pere & so forth. It could be argued that God separated the people at Babel in such a way that those who were genetically similar were given the same language, & that in this manner the various races developed. The indo-european languages for example are classified as flexional or fusional depending on which book one is reading, whereas the languages of most asiatic peoples, Turks, Koreans, Japanese, Filipinos, Malays &c. are agglutinative in structure, no indo-european languages are agglutinative. Hungarian & Finnish which are spoken in Europe are, but that is because these are not Indo-European languages. The ancestors of the Hungarians came originally from the steppes of Central Asia, which explains why the grammatical structure of Hungarian is more similar to Turkish than to Polish or German. Anyhow I suppose most find this sort of thing to be quite boring, but I've always found it interesting. Anyone who is interested can find it better explained than I'm able to do in most books on philology, the history of languages &c.

Quote from: alaric

Why should we have Chinese races? Or Arabs? Or Hindus or Bantus for that matter? After all, we're all one. That was God's original plan it seems. No racial separation, no division of ethnicities, no linguistic distinctions, no cultural barriers, no land divisions , nothing.

Yet, most of us have a mixture of nationalities in our ancestries, don't we?

Is it a problem? NO!

Actually, I think it is a big problem and one that is literally tearing America apart.  People break down along racial lines, before they get a chance to know each other, which means, they don't even know what religion others are, they're just focused on the way people look to them.  In the real world, the way you look seems to matter a lot.  

What's that got to do with "the content of your character?"  Nothing!  You're judged on how you look.  

Hiding behind The Universality of The Catholic Church won't help, because chapels, monasteries, seminaries and convents can be segregated along racial lines.  

It seems that some are forgetting what happened at the Tower of Babel was a punishment not an ideal.

I would be interested in seeing New Testament references about this. As far as I know the New Testament was about unity and God coming to save all men. The strict divisions from the Old Testament were done away with, even in Christ's own behavior, and this was a large part of what angered the Jєωs.

 

You're over-generalizing.  The famous verse by Paul, is a new testament reference to something specific.  "Neither Jєω nor greek, but all one in Christ," goes on to say, "neither male nor female," nor "slave nor master..."  Yet, all those things are still supported in the new testament, by various authors.  The admonitions for slaves is to obey their masters and for masters to care for their servants.  The admonition is for wives to obey their husbands and for husbands to be kind to their wives.  Obviously, this "universality" you're speaking of, does not extend to everything!  So, you must be over-generalizing.  

In the end, there seems to be an order or rank to things.  It does not appear that Christ came to abolish the entire order of things.  Although, he did make some very big changes.  

Paul, by the way, was very specific about his religion, his ancestry and his citizenship.  He seems to treat them as if they are three very different and separate things.