Posted on 06/23/2013 6:53:17 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
After his death-defying, history-making walk last year on a tightrope, several hundred feet above Niagara Falls, Nik Wallenda this evening will defy death yet again in his live televised walk across the Grand Canyon.
The walk will be 1,500 feet above northern Arizona’s Little Colorado River Gorge, known by locals as “Grand Canyon East.” The distance between Wallenda’s tightrope and the bottom of the gorge is equivalent to the distance between the top of Empire State Building and the sidewalk below.
So if Wallenda is off his game Sunday evening, if he suddenly encounters high winds or other deleterious conditions, he can easily plunge to his death.
Like his great-grandfather Karl Wallenda, who in 1978 attempted a walk between the twin ten-story towers of the Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, only to fall to his death before a live audience.
Many think the late Karl Wallenda’s great-grandson is tempting God by continuing to undertake extremely dangerous “skywalks” without benefit of a harness or a net. But 34-year-old Nck Wallenda, a purpose-driven Christian, sees it differently.
“Keeping the faith is all that keeps me balanced,” writes young man Wallenda, in his just-released memoir, “Balance: A Story of Faith, Family, and Life on the Line.” “If I didn’t believe, I’d fall in any number of ways. By believing, my spirit stays afloat.”
Wallenda professes that his high-wire act, which will be viewed by a national television audience, brings glory to God. He holds fast to his faith that God will be walking alongside him when he’s high above Grand Canyon East, as He was when the daredevil was high above Niagara Falls.
I’m praying for Wallenda. I believe that every time he successfully completes one of his death-defying walks, he confirms the pronouncement of the Apostle Paul that “we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
I also am persuaded that Wallenda has a unique anointing. Indeed, there were many, no doubt, who witnessed his Niagara Falls walk on TV, who heard Wallenda calling upon the name of the Lord during the live telecast, who were motivated by the Holy Spirit to seek Christ..
Similarly, there will be many who tune in tonight to see if Wallenda loses his life on live TV while attempting to traverse the spectacularly terrifying Little Colorado River Gorge or if Wallenda’s God once again delivers him from the clutches of death.
I, for one, believe God is with Nik Wallenda. And if the daredevil looks heavenward during his skywalk tonight, I believe he will see the Lord, high and lifted up.
Luke 4
1 Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 being tempted for forty days by the devil. And in those days He ate nothing, and afterward, when they had ended, He was hungry.
3 And the devil said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.”
4 But Jesus answered him, saying, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’”
5 Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. 6 And the devil said to Him, “All this authority I will give You, and their glory; for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. 7 Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be Yours.”
8 And Jesus answered and said to him, “Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ ”
9 Then he brought Him to Jerusalem, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:
‘He shall give His angels charge over you,
To keep you,’
11 and,
‘In their hands they shall bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’”
12 And Jesus answered and said to him, “It has been said, ‘You shall not tempt the LORD your God.’ ”
13 Now when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from Him until an opportune time.
So, the answer to the question contained in the headline is “yes.”
That’s not what I stated. You must understand the difference between ‘natural evil’ and ‘human evil’. Human evil is very easy to explain. When a women has a ‘doctor’ kill her baby inside the womb, that is human evil. The woman has decided to take an evil action, and the ‘doctor’ has carried out a paid murder.
In this instance, as I see it (although other Christians may disagree), whatever purpose such a child might have had was indeed prevented by the evil of another person. This is free will, which I’m sure you understand. We would not want to be puppets, and God would have no use for such creatures anyway.
Natural evil, is a tougher subject, because no entity of this earth causes a hurricane, or a spontaneous miscarriage, yet these things are hideously destructive to human life. Now, there are two theories among theologians and philosophers with regard to natural evil.
A) Natural evil is the product of a fallen world. It is perfectly possible that we have to live in a harsh world, in order for God’s purpose to be fulfilled. Some speculate that these things are the machinations of Satan. Personally, I don’t really buy into that. I just think these things naturally occur in a fallen world.
B) Every event that occurs naturally in our environment has a reason for its occurrence. Nothing is random, there are no coincidences. I’m sure you’ve heard the old analogy about the butterfly’s wings and the tornado, a key part of chaos theory. Small, seemingly insignificant events now, could have massive ramifications in the future. Who would have thought that a wrong turn by a driver in Austria-Hungary would eventually lead to the rise of Hitler, the Russian revolution, a lot of the current turmoil around the world, all knock-on effects of that spark that caused WWI?
Like I said, you and I are finite entities. Our lifespans are insignificant on this planet. We also do not transcend the universe, so we have no way of seeing the future. You might see a butterfly go past your window. How would you know that this might, through chain reaction, lead to just the right conditions for a cyclone off the coast of Fiji 100 years from now? You wouldn’t.
You have not addressed the point that if the world with God is a “fantasy”, then we really have no reason to give a hoot if a baby dies naturally, or by the hand of an abortion doctor.
The Wallendas have a family tradition of fouling up and plummeting to their demise, or at least those members of the family not related by blood. Only one Wallenda died that way, and he was 73 years old at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenda
If our lives and our awareness of our existence is all we have, then the value of life is magnified by its scarcity. Things that are limited in quantity are also the ones that become invaluable. So, if life is all you have, and death is certain, won’t you work your best to beautify it, to have others help you beautify it, and promote reciprocity? Evolutionarily and logically, promoting this benefits you.
A god that creates a child to be born dead where its death goes unnoticed, is a failed god for indulging in a purposeless creation. You haven’t really explained this problem that your belief has to square with.
that pole is almost like having a handrail ...
Until it starts to move.
“After his death-defying, history-making walk last year on a tightrope, several hundred feet above Niagara Falls....”
Sorry, but being hooked to a safety tether is NOT death defying. Now, what he’s going to do tonight with no tether IS death defying,...unless of course he’s wearing a parachute.
I think I have adequately explained that you have no way of knowing what purpose such an entity would have in anything it did, because you are not such an entity. It is like an insect watching through a window as a mathematician does calculus.
Your argument might work for preserving YOUR life, but children are born every day, all over the world. We have no reason to care about a child who dies or a man who commits suicide. And why would you promote reciprocity, especially if reciprocity is inconvenient for some individuals (e.g women who abort for financial reasons), and might deny them opportunities in life? If we die, and that is all, there is no logical purpose for our existence other than to indulge ourselves in as much pleasure as possible. We are simply a happy coincidence of evolution. We have no reason to concern ourselves with the continuance of the species. Why? What possible benefit could come to you by promoting reciprocity in others? A warm feeling inside that you helped the species? This is illusory.
When you place value on something, this is subjective to a large extent. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. If Ted Bundy said that the lives of his victims had zero value, but you said that they had high value, who is right? He perceives the life as trash, you perceive it as treasure.
Now, in a world with God, Ted Bundy is wrong. Human life has objective moral value placed upon it by its creator, whose value is indisputable. Bundy has violated a commandment given from creator to creation.
In a world without God, neither you nor Bundy are right or wrong. You simply have a different assessment of the value of human life. Bundy is doing nothing more wrong than behaving unfashionably, or straying from the herd in his beliefs.
Reciprocity is simply a mechanical function of our nature, the same for all other animals. We are compelled to reproduce by biology. Our reproduction serves no greater purpose than a ferret’s reproduction. Any greater value of our continuance that humans place, is illusory. At least, in a world without God.
And as a side note, reciprocity does help with our continuance as a species, BUT it is not necessary.
So you're wrong, it is absolutely necessary for reciprocity to exist, for you to be part of what you call civilisation.
Any behaviour that threatens the human social fabric in turn threatens its constituent individuals. This is why disparate cultures evolved laws against murder and theft, against premarital sex and fatherless child-rearing, if not without your god, then with other gods. So again, without invoking your specific god, Ted Bundy's acts would be seen as immoral simply because they threaten the social fabric, and damage trust and collaboration were the society to condone such behaviour.
Your argument might work for preserving YOUR life, but children are born every day, all over the world. We have no reason to care about a child who dies or a man who commits suicide. And why would you promote reciprocity, especially if reciprocity is inconvenient for some individuals (e.g women who abort for financial reasons), and might deny them opportunities in life? If we die, and that is all, there is no logical purpose for our existence other than to indulge ourselves in as much pleasure as possible. We are simply a happy coincidence of evolution. We have no reason to concern ourselves with the continuance of the species. Why? What possible benefit could come to you by promoting reciprocity in others? A warm feeling inside that you helped the species? This is illusory.
Wrong. Caring for another's life fosters reciprocity. It builds trust and frees individuals from allocating all their resources against defense from one another, thus giving them a very tangible advantage in living and reproducing, totally in line with Darwinian evolution. Take a look at the nomad tribes in the world today. Without settling, their numbers are limited and even here, without collaboration, individuals don't stand a chance. If they do want to settle, collaboration by way of reciprocity is of paramount importance.
You neglect the evolutionary pressures that dominate our thinking and outlook, the ones geared to goad us into reproducing and raising offspring. A Muslim is devoted to raising a family in spite of following a wrong god, because of this. The evolutionary forces making people desire such an outcome are more universal than your specific religion, thus underlining the inherent truth of the former. The best environment for one's offspring to succeed in, is one that fosters reciprocity. Because you cannot always be there to protect them. This trust is not a mere luxury but a prime necessity. You pooh-pooh it as a "warm, fuzzy feeling" out of your incapacity to recognise its importance in your life, because you don't want your dogma to collapse under the weight of truth.
Your god in the voice of a man was happy in commanding men to slaughter infants in 1 Samuel 15:3. If you can excuse this, how can you say Satan is bad? Where did that inherent value of human life disappear suddenly, from those infants who couldn't possibly have done anything yet to earn them this fate? And if they did earn it because their "evil" was foreseen by your god, then why did it conceive them, and cause them to be birthed in the first place? And if they can be forced to a trial before the act was committed, why are you allowed a pass? Your dogma has holes that cannot be patched by logic and reason, and can only be given a pass by highly subjective bias.
This is just a worldly entertainment industry event. Simple as that. I really enjoy flying (private pilot), but, as of 18 yrs ago, I no longer attend airshows. After being present at one where a pilot died, I examined myself, thinking, “What purpose was it that made me want to come to this event?” The fleshly desire to be entertained.
I think it was a couple of years ago that a woman aerobatic pilot was killed, in NW Missouri, while practicing for her airshow routine. Structural failure ended her life. Her skills were not being honed for defense of the country, or for air ambulance/rescue; but just for entertainment of herself and others. She left behind two young sons.
People choose to do dangerous things, that are totally unnecessary, everyday; like riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
God does not tell the child of God to live recklessly like the world, but rather, to come out of it.
I wonder how God sees all the millions who will tune in just to see a man die.
Yeah I know, nobody likes to admit that that’s why they’ll watch, but if they just wanted to see a guy walk a straight line they could just as well watch a roadside DUI test.
There will be a ten second delay per news stories and they won’t let those folks see that if it happens.
Haha. Well, you are definitely an atheist. The hatred towards any notion of God is palpable here. We’ll probably have to agree to disagree in light of this, but I will remind you that this is not a Reddit forum.
My assertion had nothing to do with “civilization”. You’re moving the goal posts. We were talking about the continuance of our species. Indeed civilization is not necessary for species survival, or we would be the only living things on earth.
“Human advancement would be significantly stunted, were it not for reciprocity”
And... what was the point of this statement? You can find examples of creatures who practice cannibalism, and eat their own offspring. This is not reciprocity, yet the species continues to survive. I can see no reason to put a greater value on a large human population as opposed to a small human population in a world without God. In fact, larger populations often come with problems of their own.
“Any behaviour that threatens the human social fabric in turn threatens its constituent individuals”
This does not make it objectively wrong. If I choose not to care about those individuals or your “social fabric”, and choose to place zero value on their lives, I can kill without any kind of moral qualms. In fact, there may be instances in which it is advantageous to me to kill them. I may gain something from a murder. The social fabric in your world is a construct of man, and all men being equal, your regard for it is no more valuable than my potential disregard for it. Again, we just have a different opinion, and any belief that your opinion is superior to Bundy’s is merely unjustified moral elitism. You are essentially making a god out of yourself, deciding what is right and wrong.
“This is why disparate cultures evolved laws against murder and theft, against premarital sex and fatherless child-rearing”
This is perhaps the most shaky claim you just made. If “this” is an objective reality, true for all people, that actions not promoting reciprocity are not compatible with societies, then no society in the world would ever have done anything that didn’t promote reciprocity. This is a ridiculous claim to make. Since humans have walked on the earth, there have been large societies that have undertaken horrific practices. Just look at the sacrificial rituals in ancient American societies. These civilizations did not collapse because of a lack of reciprocity, in fact they functioned well without it. Other factors caused their demise.
When you descend into petty attacks on the Christian God as a murderer, you really exit the realms of logic and attempt to fight a battle occupying two worlds. You’re applying the judgements of a world without God to a world with God. In a world with God, no action taken by God could be evil, no matter how you might perceive it as a finite, non-transcendent being. Once you enter a world in which God exists, you cannot ignore the reality of such a being’s nature. How can I not excuse any evil action taken by Satan? You seem to misunderstand what Satan is. He is a creation himself. If he carries out an evil act, it is no different to you or me carrying out an evil act. He is not a god. Indeed, he got his ass kicked out of Heaven by God.
“You pooh-pooh it as a “warm, fuzzy feeling” out of your incapacity to recognise its importance in your life, because you don’t want your dogma to collapse under the weight of truth”
And you value it because of your incapacity to recognize that any importance you place on it is illusory. You might compare it to someone in the Matrix who does not even want to think that everything is virtual because the Matrix has a “social fabric” and the world outside does not.
Of course, this is in a world without god. A world in which you and I are no more important than the salmon, having evolved through biological accident. Our species will eventually become extinct, if not through our own doing or some cataclysm, then in the heat death of the universe.
I would also like to point out that this isn’t something I am just concocting, this is the opinion of atheist scholars! It’s part of a very popular theory of ‘metaphysical naturalism’. Alex Rosenberg in his works argues that nothing has any meaning, even sentences, and any apprehension of morality or “right and wrong” are illusions of the human mind. Michael Ruse has also argued that “morality has no foundation”. There is a reason intellectual atheists are roughly split on whether to acknowledge objective morality or not. Those who don’t want to have to defend its incompatibility with atheism, often abandon it.
I would go on, but I fear I may be wasting my time. I have a feeling that you could witness a miracle first hand and you would still not believe in anything beyond the “social fabric” which must be maintained for unknown reasons. Have a good day, man. :)
I can’t even look out a high rise window without the feeling of falling.......so I don’t do it.
Oh, so if they WANT to but CAN’T then they’ll be OK.
Got it.
1 Samuel 15:3.
You conveniently skipped it.
;^)
Like I said, if you want to criticize God’s actions, you first have to acknowledge His nature, that nothing God does could ever be evil. You aren’t doing this.
In the same way, you could never say that Satan had done something good, because in acknowledging his existence, you would acknowledge that his nature prohibits any good.
There are plenty of passages you could cite where God does things that, if done by a man, would be questionable. You’re viewing God as some kind of non-transcendent entity like a king.
I'm pretty sure Nik Wallenda doesn't monopolize God's full attention.
And therein lies the rub!
Based on your subjective choice of whose mythology you accept as your god, all its actions become “moral” in your sight. Just as you equated the slaughter of the infants by a man who heard another man say that his god wanted him to do it, as “moral” since you chose to believe this is what your chosen god wanted, so too can a Muslim make arguments about the violent commandments in the Quran.
Ultimately, it’s all subjective and the acts of your god become “good” just because you’ve retroactively chosen to define what “good” is to allow this chosen god of yours, a moral pass.
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