Why does it feel like America?

Question

and the rest of the world, is being grandfathered into what the bible describes in revelations. It seems as if the major issues and ethical issues are becoming slowly but surely introduced into our lives in a slow drip. Will all the controversial issues, and bad decisions made by world leaders, and people, just become a norm, and spin people into a null to the world’s crisis? Its happening before our eyes, we sit and talk about it, like we are preparing ourselves for what we know will happen, and just wait day to day waiting to turn on the evening news to replenish the hope the government puts in us, along with the rest of the world. Its seems to be a book that we all read a million times, but haven’t really understood what it meant. It’s just weird to me. But, of course, what am I doing, writing out a question, that I hope strikes a few chords somewhere, ya know. Well, I'm done. Make with what you can from my rambling.

Answer 1

I will apologize for a longish answer and the pop-culture references up front, but it's a good question. I think about it this way,

"The problem is that prophecy is a guess that comes true. When it doesn't, it's a metaphor." (Vir Cotto, Babylon 5)

The book of revelations is one of a couple of things potentially.

1. It's accurate in a metaphorical sense - the "end times" may always seem "upon" us...

2. It's not accurate in anything like a metaphorical sense and was written with the historical events near/about the time of the writing of the books of Daniel and the Revelation of John.

3. It's the accurate fact of things at hand in the near-future. This implies that the prophecies are Thematic in nature and can be "valid" under a number of circumstances.

All "good" prophecy reads as if it was relevant to us today. Nostradamus was FAMOUS for this. His predictions had a nasty habit of coming true but not always and almost never as imagined or stated.

I can even "say" something generically and specifically true, "You will have a ham sandwich, it will be bad...the lettuce will be wilted", Odds are pretty good sometime between now and the time you die, unless you are sworn off ham sandwiches, this prophecy WILL come true.

Nostradamus has been quoted as saying "The New City at 45 degrees shall burn", great , that sucks for anyone in the New City, but pretty much any time any city anywhere near 45 degrees has a fire related incident involving more than two city blocks - TECHINICALLY one could consider the prophecy as fulfilled.

New York famously is cited as the city in question has had a significant portion of the city burned to the ground no less than two separate times once on account of accident during the (I believe) in the 1700's again in the 1780's during the Revolutionary war, and again during the Civil War by Confederate insurgents not to mention the fact that according to some sources, apparently the Soviet Union had a dead-man switch for a small nuclear weapon pre-positioned in Manhattan from the 1950's through to the mid 1980's which may or may not be in the possession of Mr. Bin Ladin & company.

But here's another trick, if enough people believe something, they can "MAKE" it true, it can also be the case that the actions or inactions of people may also "make" the prophecy come true.

This is not some pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo. I'll give an example which is cribbed more or less from a cartoon my younger cousin watches called "Avatar : The Last Airbender" but here goes a less specialized example but excellent example where "doubters" make a prophecy come true...sort of.

Let's say some dime-store prophet comes to a town near a volcano, when the volcano acts up , they says "nothing will happen to the town." and most people relax.

But some doubting visitors actually go to the top of the volcano and find the lava is creeping ever upward and unless something is done, the top will overfill the volcano in a short while, running down the side of the mountain and destroying the town.

Our helpful traveling naysayers go to the town below and convince a few more people that they MUST do something that the prophet is wrong and unless they do something, the town will be destroyed. They decide to dig a large ditch leading away from the town.

The prophet insists protesting that action is unnecessary , saying only that the town will not be harmed.

The doubting travelers don't believe the dime-store prophet.
Together they and some workers start digging a trench away from the town and a few days after they are finished digging, sure enough the lava flows down the mountain. The lava approaches the town and then is diverted by the trench.

The town is saved.

At the end the prophet takes credit for her prediction that the town was not destroyed, the prophet was right but only on the account of her doubters, hows that for irony.

It's sort of like that....sort of.

In our world today, you have evangelical Christians - to pick a group and take them to task. These folks proudly and sincerely accept as a matter of fact that the world is going to come to an end in this generation / sometime....next Tuesday after Oprah....perhaps..

The Prophet / TV Host Pat Robertson, has made a multi-decade career of predicting the end of the world is tomorrow or next Tuesday. Up until his presidential candidacy in the 1980's he was regularly prophesies the end of the world.

I don't believe that Mr. Robertson was right any time he predicted the end of the world, but a people still believe him, and more importantly they follow his prophecies and teachings as if they WERE accurate.

So with these folks when in power they sincerely believe it is not important to protect the environment, because Jesus is here (but hiding) and the Rapture is next Tuesday, so what's the point of having global warming legislation or regulating some toxin being released by ABC Manufacturing when the Earth will be gone in a few weeks anyway, by 2012AD for sure and definitely by 2259AD or 3001AD or perhaps 4004AD.

The problem is this, given enough access, enough time and enough of such dereliction of responsibility, the world may become rather hellish... on account of their inaction to act responsibly towards the planet.

In contrast to our friends the prophets of Evanglion we rational folks are armed with _scientists_ , who ALSO make predictions, but their predictions are ALWAYS couched with a degree of uncertainty and DATA to back their predictions up, you can even perform EXPERIMENTS to test their predictions, evangelists don't really have a lot of experimental data to back up their claims and there are no tests to experiment with, you'll just have to take their word for it..

Physics predicts that when I drop a feather it will hit the ground, but nothing in physics prevents a breeze from sweeping up that feather into a tree. The law of gravity didn't fail, it did however fail to predict the circumstance, because another rational event occurred which caused the feather to do something other than what we predicted it would do.

So for example, let's take our global warming or global pollution example, perhaps the worst concerns of the environmentalists ARE right and if the Earth heats up more than a few degrees, we get nasty feedbacks from the permafrost and sea levels will make the average American's homelife look like an out-take from Mad-Max or Waterworld in 200 years, is that because the prophecy was "RIGHT" all along or because we allowed religious furballs to dictate our future?

Put another way, would it _really_ matter to some future Mad-Max/Waterworld resident that the worst "prophecies" came true in the biblical sense.

Not probably, they would just know what we can only suspect, that their ancestors (us) dropped the ball and that back in the day, people "supposedly" used to be a lot better off.

Similar examples follow suit in Middle East politics, if for instance our Messianic president instigates a conflict with Iran, Pakistan may ship a couple of nuclear weapons to them as a sort of Middle-eastern version of a nuclear "Lend Lease" agreement.

If Iran or Israel or the US actually used nuclear weapons in the Middle Eastern theater of operations, VERY BAD things would necessarily happen.

Eventually,as resource prices and the unstable military furball of a situation might compel other "interested" parties to "act unilaterally".

Let's suppose that in such an instance, China finds the whole circumstance unacceptable, they might see it as perfectly rational and necessary to form and then march a large conventional force through the middle east to "restore order",killing every living thing in their way as they went.

Now if a Chinese Army of say, 10 million were mustered with even just AK-47's and sent westward with orders to eliminate any/all resistance until the oil they want/need is secured, there would really be nothing to stop them.

Would some aspect of the book of revelation have come true, Yes. Would it be the revealed word, no. It would be a large army acting in accord with it's perceived national interests.

However, you might have a hard time convincing our furball prophet Mr. Robertson, or President Bush.

For my money, I'm sure it's entirely possible, but I choose to live as if the world ISN'T going to come to a screeching halt tomorrow, since that to my mind the book of revelation is just fine, just so long as you leave me and mine out of it.

For myself, If that's what the Evangelical Christian faith is selling, we would collectively do well to keep them at very long arms length, as I find such a "vision of the future" utterly dismal.

How to avoid such a cheery future as is found in the Revelation of John, simple use common sense when considering things. Responsibly act towards the future, consider the impact of our decisions not just on ourselves but on our children's children.

That's it , problem solved.

"Beware the zealot", attributed to Jesus.
"Beware the false prophets among us" attributed to the Apostle Peter , good advice, no matter what your faith.

Answer 2

If you take a long-term perspective, history is cyclical. Mankind regularly has its ups and downs, and has survived many crises even worse than the one we are in now. The end of the world is just a metaphor for the end of an era, and time for a change of heart. Good is always locked in a struggle against evil. It is up to you (and all of us) not to wait passively to see which one wins, but to get involved in the struggle for a better world instead of watching crises unfold on tv.

Answer 3

God said twice in revelations that angels would stand on the four corners of the earth.
Sadly the earth does not have corners.

Thereby revelations is a lie.

Answer 4

its really hot and humid

Answer 5

It feels pretty damn good, thank you for asking.