Hello.
Thomas Westbrook here.
Have you ever wondered: Can prophets and fortune tellers see the future?
As skeptics, we tend to pride themselves not only on being critical of extraordinary claims,
but also on being open minded enough to change our position
if presented with enough convincing, empirical data.
But if that’s the case, then why don’t we all jump on the religious bandwagon or
at least give some notice to supernatural claims the second there’s a successful prophecy?
Prophecy isn’t new.
Almost every religion has had it in some way shape or form.
The Aztecs had prophecies about their gods returning across the sea and were convinced
that Spanish conquistadors were divine.
Hindus had fulfilled prophesies.
Greek and Roman gods fulfilled prophecies.
The Egyptians did.
The Norse gods did.
And nowadays you just have to turn on the TV to catch some street preacher making some
type of doomsday prophecy about the end times.
Harold Camping: September 6th of 1994 will be the last day
of the final tribulation period.
It is terrible, super terrible, and everyone will know it’s judgement day.
The methods of predicting the future range from tossing sticks on the ground, to gazing
into glass balls, to reading old books, to staring up at the stars to look for heavenly
messages from the gods.
Pumba: Oh.
Gee!
I always thought they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away.
What makes prophecy so utterly underwhelming is how abysmally vague and non-descript they
tend to be and how easy it is for anyone reading afterwards to come along and fulfill it.
What do I mean by this?
Well let’s say a seer prophesies about a half-bird, half-man, blue giant that will descend
in a rain of fire, from the East, in the coming months.
What we would expect is that two months later, a 12-foot-tall genetic cross-breed between
a man and blue jay would fly 1000 miles from east to west launching fireballs out of its butt.
But instead, a midget with stilts reads about the prophecy 50 years after it was written,
travels west one town over and wows a crowd with smoke tricks while wearing a prosthetic beak
The prophecy is hailed as a success!
But is it?
A century later, a blue man group impersonator lights his farts on fire from the top deck
of a Toronto Blue Jays game.
Successful prophecy!
Or, 200 years later, a slightly taller than average five foot 11, rapper from the East
coast with a feather in his hat spits flames into the mic but mixes in elements of the blues.
All are successful prophecies!
Followers of each of them claim that the rest are blasphemous.
When fortune tellers get too specific, they wind up embarrassing themselves.
like these Russian psychics who said that the dead serial killer, civilian Ted Bundy was a really nice,
military man - alive and well.
And let’s not forget all of the pastors who predicted events like the end of the world
on a specific date and have always failed.
Like when Jesus said that he would return while his disciples were still alive.
Prophecies that remain open-ended about vague events almost always come true given billions
of people, thousands of years, and hundreds of trillions of life events.
The earliest full gospels that we have weren’t written until at least a hundred years after Jesus’ death.
When you’re writing a story after the fact and have an entire book filled with vague,
potential “prophecies” to cherry pick, you can make it look like everything was predicted!
Heck, you don’t even have to be writing a fictional story.
You can take anyone’s life and make it fit a book of prophecies.
Don’t believe me?
I bet I can prove that Nostradamus predicted that Kim Kardashian’s butt would go viral on the internet.
Hmm…
No…
Not that one…
Bingo!
Century 4 Quatrain 25: “The heart of the lover, awakened by furtive love
will ravish the lady in the stream.”
This is clearly talking about people streaming Kim K.’s sex tape online.
“She will pretend bashfully to be half injured,” She acts all upset that it was leaked, damaging
her reputation, but in all actuality, it spring boarded her career.
“The father of each will deprive the body of its soul.”
This is clearly talking about Tim Berner’s Lee the father of the internet - where both
reside on a regular basis.
Because of it, those captivated with her badonkadonk have no lives, and her life as she once knew it
is no more, as she’s now followed everywhere by the soulless paparazzi.
Nostradamus wrote 942 vaguely worded, cryptic quatrains that are a gold mine for doomsday
preachers and nutty believers in prophecy.
Just imagine what you can do, and what has been done with the monstrously larger Old Testament!
You can use it to retroactively “predict” anything or claim that it predicts something
about you (after you do it in order to fulfill the prophecy of course) – this is what many
cult leaders and new religions have done and still do.
And why we’re not impressed when we read that Jesus did something specifically to fulfill
a prophecy.
Every religion claims that it has successful prophecies, but, like Nostradamus, the Aztecs,
and your local fortune teller, there’s absolutely no reason to trust prophecy and every reason
to laugh.
If fortune tellers or prophets could see the future.
You better believe that every government on the planet would have a psychic warfare division
(Minority Report style) preventing every terrorist attack ever plotted.
But we don’t.
You know why?
Because there’s no such thing as prophecy.
We can make calculated predictions and educated guesses about the future, but no one knows
exactly what the future holds, and if anyone tells you differently, guard your wallet,
and don’t drink the Koolaid.