Fulfilled Prophecy

How does a prophecy of something that has never, ever happened constitute support for fulfilled prophecy in the Bible? I went out and bought some groceries the other day. I didn't use cash, but neither did I use a "mark" on either my hand nor my forehead.And the idea of buying and selling without coin, using only marks in a book (a ledger), was an accounting technique already in widespread practice by Biblical times. A "prophecy" that predicts things that had already come to pass at the time that it was written is no prophecy at all.Neither is a prophecy that predicts events that have never happened, like a unified world government.

It's no prophecy if it was contemporary. As I've told you on multiple occasions, cashless transactions were commonplace in Biblical times. You can see smoke for many, many miles at sea. Typically seamen could see the smoke of a burning city many days out from its ports.Smoke rises, Buz. The Bible writers surely knew that, even if you seemed to have forgotten. Right. That time has come and gone with no sign of Jesus. It was, after all, supposed to happen before all of the apostles had died. (I did not, as near as we can tell.) They don't corroborate each other, though. Most of the so-called "prophecies" don't have any similarity whatsoever; no indication that they're meant to refer to the same things. If you've done your homework, how come you didn't know that cashless, ledger-based transactions were commonplace in Bible times?

What's going on now isn't relevant. It's no prophecy if the "prophecy" refers to something contemporary to the writing. It doesn't matter if it happens later, too. If I predict "trouble in the Middle East", it's no prophecy, not even if a nuclear bomb levels Tehran in 2021.The question is - did cashless transactions occur contemporary to the writing of the statement? They did, of course, so it can't be considered prophecy, regardless of what happens later. Prophecy means predicting things before they happen, not while they're happening. The "prophecy" doesn't say they'll become the majority. It just refers to them happening - and they were happening contemporary to the writing. They're backed by dollars.The prophecy, though, doesn't say anything about backing. So, no, that's not what was prophesied. That's simply your own invention.

Did you use a mark on your head or hand?

Come the fuck on, Jar. Sure, Buz's prophecies are laughable, but you're carrying on in a way that's embarassing yourself and demeaning your station as an admin.I think you set a pretty poor example with stuff like "Buz totally incompetent as well".Two admins ought to be able to develop a better way to handle disagreements than this sort of carrying on, and I don't mean to impugne Buz's behavior (although I find his reasoning inadequate for the reasons I've put forth), because he's clearly comporting himself a lot better than you are.Relax, already. Are you under the impression that there's a magic number of insults that will cause Buz to shrug his shoulders and realize how wrong he's been? (I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that.)

Oh, sorry. That must have happened while I was moving and offline.Still, though.

I don't. By all means, let him correct the record as he sees fit.But does it have to be so directly personal? Believe me, I'd be the one to know - it's not an effective strategy.People just need to relax, is all, probably myself included. I'm going to grab a cold soda and begin doing exactly that.

Is it your assertion, then, that Jews do not read the Bible?Prophecies that are fulfilled because people who heard about the prophecy wanted to fulfill them aren't prophetic, a point that has been made to you on a dozen occasions; moreover, a point that has been obvious to literally everybody since the days of classical Greece.It's the same reason that you'll never have RFID ID chips implanted in the hand or forhead - everybody knows about the "mark of the beast", and no marketing department would allow themselves to be associated with the herald of the latter days.It's astounding to me that you haven't thought through the implications of putative prophecy on human behavior, especially when people want it to happen. It should be obvious to any thinking person that legitimate prophecy has the following characteristics:1) is specific and un-retrodactable;
2) comes true in a specific, predicted narrow time frame; and
3) is unknown to those whose actions fulfill the prophecy.The "prophecy" you've put forth fails on all three counts. Anybody can generate false prophecy that has the appearance of clairvoyance. In fact, the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook II gives detailed instructions on how to do it, which I illegally reproduce here:

quote:

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Don't use names; use titles. Instead of saying "Kind Derath of Veronia", say something like "Veronia's Lord" - or better yet, "the Lion of Veronia" or even "the Lion of the East"...

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Use metaphors instead of clear statements. Don't say "dies", or "is killed"; say "falls unto darkness," "stands before his fathers", or "goes into the night." Add a random, unconnected remark like "The traitor sees it all" or "Now the door stands open to the night."

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and so on. Much like the work of Nostradamus, the Bible "prophecies" aren't magical predictions about the future - they're veiled attacks on the contemporary state powers, delivered ambiguously so that the audience catches on to the hidden meaning at the same time that they preserve plausible deniability for the author. It's a time-honored technique, used by everyone from the first storytellers gathered about the campfire to puppet shows in the streets of Rome, from Shakespeare to Stephen Colbert.The fact that you can retrodact current events into ancient statements is meaningless. We would expect a fair bit of that to occur naturally as a result of translating the Bible into modern languages. And your own obvious need to believe in Bible prophecy supplies the rest.

Buz -Do you read Hebrew and Greek? Aramaic? No?Do you think there's maybe just a possibility that translation after the fact introduces ambiguities that you're retrodacting into prophecy?

Perhaps. I certainly don't read a word of those languages, obviously, so I don't know. I guess I just had an idea the other night that perhaps, as languages change over time and old words are co-opted to name new technologies (like "calculator), old statements not meant to be prophetic might become so.For instance, a statement like "I see calculators in powerful people's pockets" written in the 1800's might appear to be a prediction of microprocessor technology, when really all that the writer meant to say was that he had evidence of corruption among accountants and their office staff. In other words, appearance of prophecy might simply be a trick of shifting language over time.

Both. As Jar (I think) pointed out, a "prophet" is not one who sees the future; merely one who sees the truth.