Prophets make a living by forecasting doom, but they really don't know anything.

Date:   12/26/2008 3:18:00 PM ( 16 y ago)

Just another "seasonal note" here... because the New Year is upon us and that is the time when we are thinking forwards.

Prophets get busy making predictions, and invariably there will be "End Times" and doom and gloom, which are the most sensational and get a lot more attention than they deserve.

Let me explain why I think that they do not deserve much attention at all:
For one thing, the track record - there have been several "millenial" predictions that did not happen, and several big events that were not predicted.

For another, I was reading, because it IS interesting, about prophets in different cultures over time. One thing that jumped out at me was that in every culture, they predicted things that were from within their cultures. The Norse ancient's prophets predicted an apocalypse that was preceeded by "a long cold winter", something they knew all too well in their part of the world! The Islamic Heaven, to which the chosen ones would ascend to, was "a cool, well-shaded, and well-watered garden" - of course, something that is much desired by their culture because of the intense heat in their part of the world.

Prophets get our attention by telling us about their visions from higher powers; their knowledge of things we do not know but that if we listen to them, we can know.

But the prophets are just making things up from what they know. It would be more credible if some of them had a vision about something that nobody had yet seen. We cannot make up things that are completely beyond our experience, it is allways a mish-mash of what we have known, like in our dreams. In dreams, we go places we have never been, and see people we have never known, but they are allways compendiums - various things put together - of what we do know.

I am just saying "beware those who try to get our attention with sensational doom and gloom". For the most part, our future, just as our past, is of our own making. Sure, there will be earthquakes and volcanoes and maybe a comet coming, but none of those things will destroy us as certainly as our own fears and greed and aggression will destroy us. When it comes to causing trouble, we do it to ourselves.

Natural disaters are small by comparison to what we do to ourselves, by our own choices. For example, only one small part of our earth-wide existence will be affected by a Tsunami, such as the one on Dec 26th 2004 in Indonesia, the worst ever, which killed 230,000 people. On the other hand, the "Iraq occupation" has killed over 500,000 civilians there [by some estimates]. Millions die of starvation and wars that are of our own making, that are largely politcal in nature.

Some day another comet will come that wipes out 90% of the life on earth, but we will now see that comet coming and we might be able to do something about it... which is the point: prophets are not correct in predicting doom and gloom because things do not happen that are inevitable, "directed by the gods", that only they know about because they were given a vision by that higher power. Its not true. It is sensationalism, its their job and it takes advantage of our fears.

So now that they New Year 2009 is about to begin, and allready has by "the calendar of the winter soltice", we would do well to accept that our future belongs to us. The financial crisis that we are in is just a blip, and although it is causing some suffering to some people, there is the potential to change things in a period of crisis so that our world is MORE stable in the future. Crisis is opportunity, but not if we let fear get ahold of us ; don't believe the doomsayers.

2009 could be a good year, lets push our leaders to make sure it is!!







 

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