What are the trumpets - the second trumpet

So the administrators and the satraps went as a group to the king and said: "O King Darius, live forever! The royal administrators, prefects, satraps, advisers and governors have all agreed that the king should issue an edict and enforce the decree that anyone who prays to any god or man during the next thirty days, except to you, O king, shall be thrown into the lions' den. Now, O king, issue the decree and put it in writing so that it cannot be altered—in accordance with the laws of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be repealed." So King Darius put the decree in writing. -- Daniel 6: 6-9

Did the Persian king truly believe that he could answer the prayers of his people? Maybe. It was certainly popular at this time for kings to claim God-like power. Now, it may seem primitive for someone to claim divinity, but as we will see, some ideas never really go away, they just get airbrushed and reissued; the name may be new, but the idea is very, very old.

I'll explain this with an example shortly, for now just let me present the second challenge.

The second challenge -- Sure, we have our problems now, but who says we won't grow out of them? Why can't mankind grow, or evolve, into something greater, something that has no need for God or any sort of divine intervention?

In 1918, while temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack, a young Austrian soldier named Adolf Hitler said he had an epiphany. Heavily influenced by social Darwinists like Friedrich Nietzsche, he realized his true purpose -- he was going to avenge Germany for its defeat at the hands of the allies (he believed that it was Jews and Marxists that had betrayed the country and caused its defeat), and bring about a new world order. Germany, or more precisely, a group of imagined Germanic ancestors called Arians were meant to fulfill the destiny of the Ubermensch (the superman). They were as far above other races and men were above apes and they deserved to rule the world because of this natural superiority.

World War II was more of a truly global affair than the first world war. Whereas the heaviest fighting in World War I was confined to the European continent, World War II had two distinct theaters of combat; one in and around Europe, one in and around the Pacific Ocean. It was fought on land, in the air, and very much on the water. Germany tried to cut off supplies to the allies by attacking shipping vessels. In the East, America's battle with the Japanese was largely a navel battle. All the while, both sides were attempting to develop the world's first working atomic weapon. The United Stated won the race, and in 1945, after dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ended the war.

Now, lets look at the second trumpet.

The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. -- Revelations 8: 8-9

Sounds like a meteor, right? It's not. It can't be. Although a meteor would quite literally satisfy the phrase 'thrown into the sea', it would violate God's promise to never again destroy the world by flood. You see, when a meteor strikes the earth it is moving at a rather brisk thirty miles a second or so. Computer simulations predict that a mountain sized ocean impact would not only create the mother of all tidal waves, it would actually throw enough water into the atmosphere to keep it raining all over the world.... for weeks. But there is another thing that looks, 'something like a huge mountain, all ablaze,' and you've probably seen video of it a dozen times.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki the US conducted a number of nuclear tests in the waters near the island of Bikini Atoll. The iconic picture associated with these tests is the Castle Bravo explosion, the detonation of the world's first hydrogen bomb -- a plume of fire and radioactive debris that looks very much like an oddly shaped mountain, pointing nose-down into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

And what drove mankind to create an arsenal of these weapons so large that it could destroy all life on earth a dozen times over? Fear, suspicion, manipulation, all the things we discussed in the last post? Certainly. But to this list we now add another and it's the same thing that can make a man believe that he can answer prayers, the same thing that made a humble Austrian foot-soldier think it was justifiable to gas over six million of his fellow human beings:

The answer to the second challenge -- you can't become God, but you can almost create the illusion of becoming more divine. You do this by pretending the people around you are less than human. As they shrink, you 'grow'. And in doing this you completely surrender your humanity, but not because you're becoming more. In reality it's because you're becoming less.

Up next is Wormwood.