The Problem with Prophecy
Doomsday prophecies are nothing new. Neither is a widespread desire to believe them. But in the end, they’re meaningless. The thing that most people fail to realize about “prophecy” is that it is ultimately open to interpretation. If an individual wants to believe a prophecy is true, whether as reinforcement for their religious world view, because they’re superstitious, or simply because the idea of a Universe in which they might actually be accountable for their actions is truly terrifying, it is a relatively simple matter to interpret specific lines as being relevant or in reference to actual historical events. The fact that the link between the event and the prophecy exists only in their mind is all too easy for them to dismiss.
Nostradamus is famous, or infamous, for a plethora of prophecies he wrote in his life time. He has been credited with predicting World War 2, the Atomic Bomb, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, and more, but the truth is none of these things are actually explicitly expressed in his own words. Rather, he uses vague poetic images which people hundreds of years later have decided allude to events that transpired between the time of Nostradamus and their present time. This is like seeing a television with no signal, cluttered with snow, then suddenly seeing the image of a sailboat after somebody else tells you it is there. It is all to easy to fit the random elements into a pattern when you have a pattern you want or expect to see.
This same process holds true with “biblical prophecy.” Most “biblical prophecy” as espoused by the “Rapture Ready” is a crude hack job of biblical texts that has as much reason and consistency as William S Burrough’s “cut up” technique of writing. That is to say, they’ll take a few lines from one book, a few lines from another, toss them in a blender, set it to puree, and then pour out the sauce and go “literal interpretation of the ineffable word of God” despite the fact that for it to be the “literal interpretation of the ineffable word of God” it would a) have to be true for the present time, which would b) make it utterly meaningless and insensible for the 2000 some odd year history of Christianity. I have a hard time seeing how something “ineffable” can be right for the last 20 years, and wrong for the 2000 years proceeding it. That seems like a pretty huge and glaring error.
At the end of the day, the value of prophecy to those that believe in it is the concept that things are preordained. That they are not accountable, or for that matter, even capable of affecting the world in which they live or it’s future. It is in short a “bury your head in the sand” card. If everything has already been foretold, why make an effort to change it? This is why prophecy, despite being utterly bogus, is all too dangerous. If people at large do not make an effort to create positive change, to push for progressive reform that safeguards the environment while elevating the living conditions of human beings, then nothing will change. The status quo is not our friend. While what we know may be comfortable, it is anything but safe.
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