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> Prophecy, Any takers?
 
Are earth events prophecy being fulfilled?
Yes, absolutely. [ 9 ]  [40.91%]
No, not at all. [ 4 ]  [18.18%]
Maybe, not sure. [ 5 ]  [22.73%]
Other. [ 4 ]  [18.18%]
Total Votes: 22
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SCShamrock 
Posted on 10-Oct-2005, 11:50 AM
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I know many of you already know this, but for those who don't, I am a believer in God, proclaimer of the Son Jesus Christ as my personal savior, and hold to every little word in the Christian bible. So for me, there is much relevance in my world in light of bible scriptures. I think about it often, and see the wisdom in what I have read as it applies not only to my life, but in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. One thing I see as being glaringly obvious is bible prophecy being fulfilled, almost daily!

Ok, for the unbelievers or the fence squatters, last year's tsunami may well have been a wake-up call. I wasn't altogether alarmed by it other than its catastrophic effects, but many were. It was apocalyptic; a natural disaster like no other, yet alone it did not warrant doom's day accreditation.

Then there is Katrina to consider. Wow, one storm actually wreaking that much havoc! But alone, she was just another cycle of spinning wind and pressure.

What must be considered is the big picture. Bible prophecy speaks to a variety of conditions that would be present in the "last days", and weather is just one of them. There are political situations, moral and ethical issues within our society, and the stage getting set for a one-world government, a single form of currency, and eventually a cashless society. More specifically, the bible refers to nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, brother against brother. It speaks of earthquakes and famines in various places. The apostle Paul, in 2Timothy, Ch. 3, offers a detailed laundry list of social ills to be in existence during this time, and I think a quick review of that will reveal today's situation in toto. I think most of us can see how some of those prophecies are becoming more and more possible; much more so than in our parent's and grand-parent's time. But the earth is a clear, observable part for the masses to consider; both the learned and the unaware alike. Pssssss~ earthquakes are not often weather related. smile.gif

So I ask you, do you believe that the planet is trying to tell us something? Are earth events of late just random occurrences, or do they tell a tale of things set in motion thousands of years ago?


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CelticCoalition 
Posted on 10-Oct-2005, 07:15 PM
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Well, I hit the wrong button and gave a null vote instead of a no vote, so i'll just say that I was going to vote no.

I think that so called "prophecies" can be attributed to many different time periods, and it isn't until after these events occur that people say, oh wow, the bible said this was going to happen.

The bible's prophecies have been warned about throughout history when large events have occured. Does the bible predict all these events, or is it simply 20/20 hindsight? I think it's the later.


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SCShamrock 
Posted on 10-Oct-2005, 09:10 PM
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Sean,

I see your point, and to some extent I agree although I did make the same mistake you did with the "null vote", but it would have been for the affirmative. Here's my reasoning. The bible compares the fulfillment of end times prophecy to labor pains of a pregnant woman. As we know, when a woman goes into labor, the pains are moderate, and spaced rather far apart. But as she gets closer to birthing the baby, the pains become more intense, longer lasting, and closer together. Some research I would love to see, although I don't have the patience to do it myself, would be a graph of the earthquakes and other natural disasters, plus famines, sickness, wars, etc., over the last, say, fifty years. I would bet that there is a trend toward a continuous increase in all these areas. Just a thought there.

QUOTE (CelticCoalition)
The bible's prophecies have been warned about throughout history when large events have occured. Does the bible predict all these events, or is it simply 20/20 hindsight? I think it's the later.


Yep, every time a big, awful even occurs, there are people everywhere crying "the end is near!" I don't buy that. I'm more interested in the greater number of successive events rather than those isolated ones.
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WizardofOwls 
Posted on 10-Oct-2005, 09:35 PM
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Well I, of course, voted yes, absolutely! (Was there ever any doubt? wink.gif ) I too am a Christian, and am a full believer in a literal translation of the Bible. Yes, we have had tragedies and catastrophes in the past, but have there ever been so many within such a short time span, combined with signs and wonders in the heavens (how many times in the past few years have we heard the words "never happened before... or first time in thousands of years... won't happpen again in thousands of years) as well as talk of citizen ID cards, smart chips, chip implants and on and on and on. Sorry, I don't see here how there can be any question that He is coming soon, jsut like He said He would!


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dundee 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 10:08 AM
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me thinks.... if anyone read the scriptures ..... you would certainly be pulled to believe that prophesy is being fulfilled...... aye i am a firm believer that they are....

the thing is as Christ fullfiled the prophecies of His coming... the Religious of the time refused to or couldnt see it... they interpreted prophecy as they wanted in their finite minds to interpret it...

i think.....


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stoirmeil 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 10:29 AM
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One thing that is known about us as a species is that we are more anxious when there appears to be no pattern to what we perceive, and we adapt by creating pattern cognitively, whether it can be substantiated or not. Does this mean there is not a greater pattern? Not necessarily. But the fact that it is we humans who see it (or think we see it) makes it suspect, without some kind of verification from outside the human system. I understand there are some who will say that verification has been provided from outside the system in a revelatory fashion, which kind of closes the loop and precludes any further discussion.

People who study long periods of geological and meteorological activity see patterns that greatly predate human existence, according to their research presumptions as to the world's age, so if they are right this is not primarily a human-centered pattern. (There is also a tendency for humans to interpret events in reference to themselves.) As far as wars, famines, and plagues and their effects on us go, I believe we play a tremendous part, indeed the main part, in creating or failing to avert those ourselves, without any help from outside the system.
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SCShamrock 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 12:44 PM
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QUOTE (stoirmeil @ 11-Oct-2005, 11:29 AM)
As far as wars, famines, and plagues and their effects on us go, I believe we play a tremendous part, indeed the main part, in creating or failing to avert those ourselves, without any help from outside the system.

One thing I would be interested in is your opinion of those events, as relevant to the prophecies of the Bible, when it is seen that they are ever increasing in intensity, frequency, and diversity of locale.
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Antwn 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 02:25 PM
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QUOTE (stoirmeil @ 11-Oct-2005, 11:29 AM)
I understand there are some who will say that verification has been provided from outside the system in a revelatory fashion, which kind of closes the loop and precludes any further discussion.


Precognitive revelations are themselves within the human system since they occur within humans, as is the concept and interpretation of personal revelation itself pursuant to the precognition of events. If this is a reference to some intelligent universal force extramural to human consciousness thought to generate such revelations, these distinctions cannot be so easily made. If generator and recipient are separate, then what is omnipresence?

Religious justifications are predicated on circular arguments in lieu of independent corroboration I agree, hence the reliance on faith. Not only do humans play a tremendous part in wars, famine, plagues etc, but a great deal of denial is maintained when responsibility can be placed upon a capricious universal overseer and human suffering is justified as harbinger of the return of Superman. Convenient if the illusion of plausible deniability is something to which humanity wants to commit itself.....even when the delusion is not particularly plausible. wink.gif Collective humanity chooses the conditions of its social order. What does one say when the attributing of responsibility for these particular human events and the vicissitudes of their rectification is predicated upon quixotic fantasies?



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stoirmeil 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 05:00 PM
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QUOTE (Antwn ap Ioan @ 11-Oct-2005, 03:25 PM)
If generator and recipient are separate, then what is omnipresence? 

Religious justifications are predicated on circular arguments in lieu of independent corroboration I agree, hence the reliance on faith. Not only do humans play a tremendous part in wars, famine, plagues etc, but a great deal of denial is maintained when responsibility can be placed upon a capricious universal overseer and human suffering is justified as harbinger of the return of Superman.  Convenient if the illusion of plausible deniability is something to which humanity wants to commit itself.....even when the delusion is not particularly plausible.  wink.gif  Collective humanity chooses the conditions of its social order. What does one say when the attributing of responsibility for these particular human events and the vicissitudes of their rectification is predicated upon quixotic fantasies?

Fair enough, a good question. It sounds like you're talking about ideas of transcendance versus immanence, which is an old theological debate, and how God could be both outside the system as agent, and completely permeated through it at the same time. Apparently it never stops being an important contradiction to resolve:

http://www.theologicalstudies.citymax.com/...44043/17479.htm
http://www.urantiabook.org/archive/readers/doc178.htm

I'm content to let the theologians keep working on the apparent paradox. smile.gif
But Antwn's point is well taken -- given what else we know about the way humans manage their aversion to chaos, if the signals are not completely independent of us, what do they really signify? I'm afraid I have to emphasize something else, as a teacher of psychology: We don't experience the majority of our cognitive functions in an aware state. It would be much too slow. Awareness is more like the tip of an iceberg really. So there are times when the human mind does things the human owner can't explain, and this is not comfortable. Am I denying the existence of God, or claiming that God is a human invention? No. I am saying, however, that you need to examine alternative explanations for phenomena like prophecy, or the experience of the prophet, and hold them in mind.

Also, we have a couple of terms on the table about which we may not be thinking in exactly the same way, and the first is prophecy itself. The first definition you encounter in a dictionary is that it is the inspired utterance of a prophet of God's purpose and will. This could be a simple directive. The second definition is prediction of future events. Needless to say these two meanings don't have to be mutually exclusive, but I'm thinking we are talking more about the second meaning here: is what the Bible predicted, however many years ago, coming true int he present? (And then, what other inferences can we make given the apparent accuracy of its predictions?)

Then, the words cognition and precognition don't quite match up in intention, though they look as though they should be predictably related. Cognition is the act or process of knowing, including both awareness and judgement (meaning comparison with previous experience already in memory). Precognition is defined as clairvoyance relating to an event or state not yet experienced. You would think that it means a state of knowing something that is knowable by cognitive processes, only it happens before typical perceptions are processed in the usual way, but I don't think it does mean that.

Now, to get to Rob's question: It certainly does seem, from our present perspective, that big stressors on the human population are increasing in intensity and frequency. One non-prophetic explanation for this might be that the population has reached a critical density and is beginning to overwhelm its resources. (I grant you it might not look like that from "here" -- our western developed vantage point -- because of the uneven distribution of population density and resources, which we're on the optimal end of.) Most any species that stresses the environment begins to regulate itself with decreased birth rates, diseases (proximity helps that solution), starving out, and other ways of cutting itself back. We do war, pretty much uniquely. War is a human behaviour, always was. Is it a God-given human behaviour? A gift of sorts, for our self-regulation, that may be the only match for the intense, expansive capacity of our frontal cortices? Then it would make sense, within the created ecosystem of some agency of -- let's say -- intelligent design, that that agency would be able to predict it. You don't even have to posit it as a punishment, just a predictable periodic regulatory state, very natural.

But that is problematic when we want a God whose name is Love. And I think we can't want anything else, as a function of our developmental features, our vastly extended childhoods, our long, intense experience of the nurturing family unit. It programs us to think that the intelligence must know us and must care. Circle that around, and we have to infer that the intelligence made us this way, uniquely, so we could be aware of it and its intentions, even while it also made us to be within natural animal laws.

And things are getting pretty overwhelming for humans, noxiously so, so it's very natural to think in teleologic terms that not only rescue but bring a halt to the conditions altogether in some way that transcends the natural balance of self-destructive forces.

What do I think? I think we've run out of control as a species. In fact, I think we may be an evolutionary experiment that is failing, and not the first. Does that negate the existence of God? Not at all. But it may mean that we are not as special or uniquely favored in the overall design as we think we are. It's very painful to entertain that thought, but if we could, we might be able to pull ourselves back from the edge.

Assuming we could accept that perspective even provisionally, could that have been predicted? I think anyone of extraordinary insight who had been watching the progression, with an added leap of poetry, could have predicted the signs and portents of war, famine, pestilence (which can and do apply to more than one era of our historical experience, but that's no secret. I give you freely that we keep getting more and more adept technologically at transgressing natural laws and warning signs, though . . . which may be reaching the end of tolerance). It is extraordinary to do that, to prophesy I mean, out of some pressure you aren't consciously aware of and can't explain, especially when the news is bad and folks want to kill you for saying it out loud. (Psychologists call behaving in a way that seems like someone else is directing your actions as "ego dystonic" -- basically , "not-me.") You could call it the Divine within the system, the immanent, expressing through a human. You could call it temporal lobe seizures too, and prophecy has been called that. I'm not coming down on either side. Antwn has some opinions about human motivations for understanding prophecy the way we tend to, and to be honest I'm not really in disagreement with him, but I prefer to stay neutral about that, at least for now.
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SCShamrock 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 05:05 PM
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Antwn ap Ioan and Stoirmeil,

I would be interested in hearing your views about the likes of Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce.
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stoirmeil 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 05:24 PM
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QUOTE (SCShamrock @ 11-Oct-2005, 06:05 PM)
Antwn ap Ioan and Stoirmeil,

I would be interested in hearing your views about the likes of Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce.

Haven't engaged their ideas in any depth. unsure.gif Point me to something you want me to look at.
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CelticCoalition 
Posted on 11-Oct-2005, 07:33 PM
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Well, I would say that the reason these disasters appear to be getting worse and worse are based on the destruction of human buildings, etc and human death. I believe these are increasing more due to the increase in human population and density rather than increases in the severity of these disasters.
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dundee 
Posted on 12-Oct-2005, 08:21 AM
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QUOTE (CelticCoalition @ 11-Oct-2005, 08:33 PM)
Well, I would say that the reason these disasters appear to be getting worse and worse are based on the destruction of human buildings, etc and human death. I believe these are increasing more due to the increase in human population and density rather than increases in the severity of these disasters.

Prophecy..... it doesnt matter how it is fulfilled, but that it is fulfilled.
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Antwn 
Posted on 12-Oct-2005, 04:55 PM
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Stormeil - Thanks for the distinction between prophecy and precognition. I liked your post. Your tact is probably wise.

Shamrock - While I know who Cayce and Nostradamus were, I've not read any of their writings so can't venture an opinion.
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reddrake79 
Posted on 15-Oct-2005, 08:53 AM
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Hello all, I belive that Bible prophecy is being fullfilled.
Paul, who wrote most of the new testament, thought bible prophecy was being fulfilled in his own time and that he would see the return of Christ during his life. The prophecy about wars, rumors of wars, famine, and natural disasters ( found in Matthew and other books) has always seemed applicable to every era in time. When I was younger the US thought world war 3 would happen with the soviet union. A major earthquake destroyed much of san fransisco or LA ( I cant remember which city) People in Africa were experiencing (and still are) famine. However that was close to 20 years ago. Has Bible prophecy been fulfilled, certainly. My bible class and I have recently talked about this very topic. Daniel, captive and later cabinet member, of the babylonian nation once interpreted one of Nebuchadnezzers dream. That dream involved a statue of Neb. (Im shortening the name smile.gif ) That statue was sectioned by metal. Daniel said the metal described the nations that would come after Neb. He predicted the rise and fall of the roman empire before romulus and remus were ever born. Sure sometimes we don't understand a prophecy until we are in the midst or after the event. That is because the prophet may not have understood what he was seeing. Do you think John could have understood what tanks, a-bombs, or missles were just by seeing them? Or some other weapon that hasn't been invented yet? They had to give their best understanding of what they saw. Other times the prophecy is very clear and specific. All the prophecies about the messiah were fullfilled by Jesus Christ. there are so many prophecies about the messiah that statistically speeking it would have been impossible for one man to manipulate himself into a position to fulfill, also some of those prophecies a man would have been unable to fill because it relied on someone elses actions. I believe psychologically speeking (now I am not a psychologist, so someone please correct me if my assumtions are wrong smile.gif ) that if a person claims to see the future and those events do not come true then he is at the least a liar, perhaps crazy. If the events do come true then he is either lucky, or a prophet. One time could just be luck, more than that could be skill (he knows his football teams), events that he will never be able to witness (roman empire) he is probably a prophet. Since the bible does claim to fortell the future, the real question is has it been right before. I say yes. Now, does that mean it will be right in the future. Yes. Prophecy is being fullfilled now Wars- war on terorism, rumor of wars-doesn't have to be with the US, famine- Many third world countries, plague- bird flu epidemic, natural disasters- tsunamis, hurricans, earthquake.


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