Misunderstanding ad majorem Dei gloriam

I attended mass yesterday at the Mary the Queen Chapel. The focal point of the 1st reading was Acts 2:11 which says: “We hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God”.

The gospel showed how so many people with different languages understood one another through the workings of the Holy Spirit. The homily of the priest mentioned the story of the Tower of Babel in relation to said gospel. He noted that what happened in the gospel is the exact opposite of that in the Tower of Babel. In the latter, God caused the confusion amongst the builders by making them speak different languages thereby resulting in misunderstandings (Genesis 11:1-9). Thus, the tower intended to reach as high as heaven was never constructed. As can be immediately noticed, this wasn’t the case in the gospel where the Holy Spirit facilitated the understanding among men of different languages when they were speaking of the mighty acts of God. The reason given by the priest why God caused the miscommunication of the tower builders but facilitated the understanding in the gospel was because the men sought to build the tower without God while the latter case sought to glorify him.

This explanation immediately called to mind something I read from Christopher Hitchens’s “The Portable Atheist” which contains an excerpt of George Eliot’s article attacking the teachings of a well-known evangelical divine of his time, to wit:

[A]ctions are good or evil according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference to the “glory of God.” God, then, in Dr. Cumming’s conception, is a Being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and justice, considered as affecting the well-being of His creatures; He has satisfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and dispositions of all relation to our fellow beings, and replace sympathy with men by anxiety for the “glory of God.” x x x He is a God who, instead of sharing and aiding our human sympathies, is directly in collision with them; who, instead of strengthening the bond between man and man, by encouraging the sense that they are both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts Himself between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have relation to Him. He is a God who, instead of adding His solar force to swell the tide of those impulses that tend to give humanity a common life in which the good of one is the good of all, commands us to check those impulses, lest they should prevent us from thinking of His glory.

With my limited reasoning faculty, I cannot comprehend the true reason why the tower builders was handed that fate. What is clear though from these teachings is that an action is never good if not done for the sole purpose of glorifying the name of God; that an act spawned from his own moral impulse to help another human being is not good unless the ultimate reason for such an act is for the greater glory of God. It appears then that God, as portrayed by the religious, is an envious and narrow-minded being who cannot, and will not, permit an action to be considered good if not done for His glory.