Christianity and the End Times

I'm betting he doesn't really do that.

If you can't deal with it, you can't declare it false either. And you certainly can't just brush it aside claiming it wasn't presented.

Hmm.... When I Googled, "winged lion on Babylon gate," I got Barry Setterfield's page on prophecy.Anyway, if the Jews had seen that image in Babylon, it's no surprise that it would end up in their consciousness. That tends to diminish the likelihood that the "vision" was real.

That's what I said. Sure, and basing the prophecy on easily understood symbolism eliminates the need for an actual "source" for the prophecy.Edited by ringo, : Fixed quote.

Sure they are. That's how people could figure out what the prophet meant. You make the mistake of assuming that the prophecies were meant for you, and that only you can understand the symbolism. In fact, the prophecies were meant for the people they were given to. Your interpretations are just made up.

Your ideas about prophecy are not in the Bible.

The real issue is whether we can count on outside help. Clearly, we can't.The sad part of the prophecy scam is that it keeps saying, "Help is on the way, just around the corner," but it never comes. It's always just out of reach.The Bible does tell us to do it ourselves (build our own ark) but some people prefer to have empty faith that somebody will come to do it for them.

quote:

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The easiest person to deceive is one's self. -- Robert Bulwer-Lytton

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He also said, "You believe that easily which you hope for earnestly."

That would be true if the prophecies were meant for the relatively short term. If they were meant for our time, we'd expect new empires to emerge.

You're ignoring empires that did exist - e.g. the Ottoman and British Empires - because they' re not mentioned in the prophecy. Logically, either the time of the prophecy is past or your identification of the empires it mentioned is wrong. You can' t reverse-engineer history to fit the prophecy.

No, it isn't about whether or not your interpretation will turn out to be true. It's your whole rationale that's wrong. You make the same mistake that you make with the flood story: you assume that (your interpretation of) the Bible is correct and you mangle the facts to fit your interpretation. What you should be doing is using reality to check whether or not your interpretation is valid.

You're making the mistake of assuming that the prophecy will be fulfilled. And you're compounding the mistake by assuming that the prophecy will be fulfilled according to your preconceived interpretation. There's no room in your thinking for the possibility that the prophecy failed.

You believe the Bible because of fulfilled prophecy and you believe the prophecy will be fulfilled because the Bible is always right. Your reasoning is circular - which is why it doesn' t produce results that fit reality.

You're being dishonest. If it was any religion but your own, that's exactly what you'd be suggesting. You know very well that people would do that.

How do you tell the difference? How do you know what is God's imagination and what is your imagination about God's imagination?