Prophecy for Buzsaw

You don't find it significant in the least that, given statements of sufficient non-specificity, you can interpret them in the light of current events and turn just about anything into prophecy?If the Bible has foreknowledge why isn't it specific? Why doesn't the Bible say "Israel will form as a nation again in 1948"?That would be prophecy. That would turn some heads. But the stuff you have only works if you abandon any sort of sceptical discernment.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-20-2004 11:41 AM

You need to read your own article a little closer. The number of victims may be on the rise; it's always been on the rise, because populations are on the rise.An earthquake has no victims if no one lives where the quake is. How, out of curiosity, did you get Mike the Wiz, our resident evangelist, in this list of "unbelivers"? Hrm, how many times has the end of the world been predicted? From the Bible, even?All those guys were wrong. Hundreds of times, wrong. What makes you any different?

Hi, remember these rules you agreed to when you registered?

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Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

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By what rationale did you feel you got to ignore the rule? I'm just curious.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-20-2004 04:08 PM

"To me, having my husband tell how he's gonna give me a black eye if I don't grab him a beer and finish the dishes is an act of Love and Mercy so that I might escape these judgements."

Because all populations are always on the rise until they reach K. That's biological fact. Organisms have more offspring than it takes to replace themselves. The fact is, they aren't. There's the same number of earthquakes there always has been. Now, though, we notice more of them, because less of them happen where there are no people or detectors. And you have? Prove it. Why should I put any more trust in your reading than in theirs? Sorry, but with a track record as shitty as you Bible prophecy folks have, I'm not going to be cancelling my weekend plans just yet.

"You just don't get how my husband's love works. He only beats me because he loves me. See these two black eyes? Those are the marks of his love."Lys, I think there's shelters that people in your position can go to. You don't have to take the abuse, you know. It doesn't have to be this way. Sure it's simple. God is too clumsy to avoid collateral damage. he's much like the US Air Force that way.

That's the argument the UN offered, so yes, I'd say it would. As I said, you didn't read enough of your own article.There are not more earthquakes. There are more fatalities from earthquakes. Global warming due to human industrialization increasing thermal energy levels in the atmosphere? Just one idea off the top of my head, and a lot more provable than "god's wrath." Ok, prove it with the stats. I think going back about 100,000 years would be about long enough to substantiate any sort of climatalogical trend.

Why don't you do what we do and both link the article and quote the relevant portions, introducing them with your own remarks?It's the best of both worlds. You supply the info you want, the link keeps it in context, the message is short, and punctuated by your own thoughts for discussion.

How would a sinless Earth "cope" with a disaster? Sin doesn't change the laws of physics. None of your post makes any sense.

I still don't understand what prophecy is.Anyone can make statements about the future - that's very common. It's very easy to make predictions about events that will happen in the future with no supernatural input whatsoever.In fact, anybody who tries to do this rapidly discovers some obvious things, like, the more general and nonspecific you make your predictions, the more likely something will happen that fits them.Also, certain predictions are self-fulfilling - the very act of making the prediction influences events in favor of the prediction coming true.So, by what means do we distinguish between prophecy of this sort, which is really just a kind of cleverness with no supernatural component; and the "supernatural" prophecy purported to be in the Bible?If clever people can make startlingly accurate predictions about the future; or else phrase predictions in such a way that a staggeringly large number of events can appear to have been "predicted"; why conclude that the "prophecy" in the Bible is anything else?

What's impossible about that? Once you've abstracted wealth into coins, and once you have a system of mathematics, further abstraction doesn't really seem that outlandish.People in ancient times were primitive, Buz, not idiots.AbE: Actually, it turns out (as I do more research) that the reason this is not such an unsurprising "prophecy" is that they'd already been doing this for 300 years:

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When Egypt fell under the rule of a Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies (323-30 BC) the old system of warehouse banking reached a new level of sophistication. The numerous scattered government granaries were transformed into a network of grain banks with what amounted to a central bank in Alexandria where the main accounts from all the state granary banks were recorded. This banking network functioned as a giro system in which payments were effected by transfer from one account to another without money passing. As double entry booking had not been invented credit transfers were recorded by varying the case endings of the names involved, credit entries being in the genitive or possessive case and debit entries in the dative case.

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It's not a surprising prophecy, Buz. They were already doing this. I am really serious about prophecy. But even the ancient Greeks realized the difficulty in distinguishing between real clairvoyance and totally natural phenomenon like intentionally vague predictions and self-fulfilling predictions.By every indication, Buz, it's you who is not serious about prophecy, because you don't know how to recognize it.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-22-2004 02:03 AM

I'm sorry, I didn't see where it said "electronic wireless tech" in the Bible. Can you show me that passage?As for the rest, I've answered this already. The people who would have "dreamed" it up are the same people that had been doing it already, in certain limited applications, for the last 400 years.It's not a great stretch of the imagination to go from the specific to the general, or to see that something works so well that "everybody" will be doing it in time.

But as we've seen, the sort of banking you've described was not in the least unlikely; it had been in use, in specific applications, for 400 years.Predicting then that the same techniques would be used more generally, and possibly universally, is not a great leap of the imagination.

Which is irrelevant, because those things aren't predicted in the Bible. You seem to have a staggering inability to separate the concept from the implementation. In a culture with other mediums of exchange besides metal? Why on Earth would that be the case? But the metal coins were merely stand-ins for livestock, oils, preserved meats and grains, and other barterable items. The only reason they were "precious" in the first place was because they were easily minted into trade tokens.So what you're telling me is, in a society that had developed an abstract trading economy, banking, money changing, and bookkeeping, it would have been impossible to imagine a system where finances were abstracted, banked, changed, and kept in books?How dumb do you think people were back then, Buz? You honestly believe that nobody could have seen the writing on the wall? That bookkeeping was an easier way to deal with large sums of money than coinage?How dumb do you think I am, to believe that nobody could imagine something that had been in front of them for 400 years?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-23-2004 11:06 PM

Isn't this a self-denying prophecy?Implantable RFID technology exists; let's say that Mastercard institutes a program where you can have an RFID implanted somewhere in your body, which you can swipe over a reader instead of supplying cash or a credit card. (Mobil does something like this at their gas stations, only it's a keychain fob instead of an implant. Same tech, though.)Now, the chip can be implanted anywhere on the body. The forehead is inconvinient, but wouldn't they refuse to implant on whichever hand you say is in the Bible, just to avoid associations with you Revelations kooks?Furthermore, RFID codes are unique but arbitrary. By the same motivation of avoiding associations with people like you, wouldn't they specificaly not have the ID's start with the Mark of the Beast? That's obvious, I would think.While implantable RFID for commerical purposes might come to be, it will never start with 666, simply because people like you say that the Bible predicts it as a harbinger of the end times. It simply won't happen, precisely because people like you say it will. Isn't that exactly the number they wouldn't have it be?