In this Aug. 7, 1974, file photo, Philippe Petit, a French high wire artist, walks across a tightrope suspended between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York. Petit and his companions surreptitiously strung a wire between New York City's recently constructed World Trade Towers on Aug. 6, 1974, and Petit walked across it the next day. He danced, strutted and clowned around for 45 minutes as startled bystanders watched from 110 stories below. The Frenchman's stunt is the subject of the 2008 documentary "Man on Wire" and the 2015 film "The Walk," starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. (AP Photo/Alan Welner, File)
Philippe Petit is an equestrian, juggler, fencer, carpenter, rock climber, and bullfighter. However, he is best known for walking high wires connected between very tall structures. And he is most known for what he did on this day in 1974, when he walked a high wire stretched between the Twin Towers in New York City.
I remember my first time seeing the towers. I got out of my cab, stood at the base of one of them, and looked up as high as I could, but could not see the top of the building. Only if I had lain on the ground could I have gained the angle necessary to see the entire structure.
Petit saw them from their roofs when he walked a 131-foot-long cable connecting the two, 1,350 feet above the Plaza below. He went back and forth several times without a net.
When he accomplished his feat, who would have imagined that Petit would outlive the towers?
“There is no right or wrong”
I just finished Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rubin is a record producer with multiple Grammy Awards. He is especially known for collaborating with a large spectrum of artists as a producer and coach.
One of the consistent themes of his book is that there is no right or wrong, and truth is what you believe it to be. An example: “If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things.” He added, “Anything that allows the audience to access how you see the world is accurate, even if the information is wrong.”
Rubin eloquently expresses the conventional wisdom of our time, postmodern relativism. Briefly stated, this is the conviction that all truth claims are personal and subjective. Since our minds interpret our senses, and no one’s senses and minds are precisely like anyone else’s, all “truth” must be the product of our subjective experiences.
Anyone who remembers 9/11 knows this truth claim to be a lie.
Why al-Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers
As I have written often in books and articles, radical jihadists have a very cohesive worldview built on these premises:
- The West has been attacking Islam since the Crusades.
- The modern State of Israel is a theft of land from its original Muslim owners.
- By supporting Israel, the West is complicit in this attack on Muslims.
- All Muslims are part of the global ummah, the Islamic civilization, so an attack on one is an attack on the faith itself.
- The Qur’an requires Muslims to attack those who attack Islam as a defense of their faith (Surah 2:190).
- The West is comprised of democracies in which we elect our leaders, serve in our military, and support our government with our taxes. Thus, all Americans are complicit in this perceived attack on Islam.
As a result, in the minds of the al-Qaeda terrorists, the 9/11 attacks were not an unprovoked assault on innocent Americans. Rather, they were a defense of Islam striking back at the heart of “Crusader” Western aggression—the Twin Towers representing the financial, the Pentagon the military, and the White House (the likely target of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania) the political.
Of course, I disagree with everything I just wrote. But for Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists (they would call themselves “martyrs”), these claims were “their truth.”
If Rubin is right that “there is no right or wrong,” how are we to respond to them? To Hamas’s horrific invasion of Israel or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? What should we have done after Pearl Harbor?
In addition, the logic of Rubin’s assertion is obviously fallacious: if “there is no right or wrong,” how can his statement be right? Relativists want us to believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, but this is an absolute truth claim.
“Take every thought captive to obey Christ”
Those who adopt the cultural abandonment of truth and morality are walking a tightrope between towers destined to collapse. To shift metaphors, they are building their house on sand rather than rock (Matthew 7:24–27).
It is vital that we choose not to join them.
One of the most important verses in Scripture for our day is 2 Corinthians 10:5:
“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
How is relativism tempting you to choose immorality today?
What “thought” do you need to take “captive to obey Christ” right now?
Search
