uppity humans: God hates machine translation

Talking to my mom this afternoon, she brought up the story of the Tower of Babel. (I forget exactly why; this is not the sort of thing she usually brings up...)

If you're not familiar with that story, it's from Genesis. It's really short, here's the whole thing:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, "Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth." But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel -- because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

What a jerk.

So under this interpretation: working on translation at all, or tools for translation, or especially free software tools to help everybody build good MT systems... is an affront to the divine? I don't think I've yet met somebody who takes this stance. Perhaps they're out there.