Give me a Date
I was talking to
this Christian friend of mine and the conversation turned to Biblical
prophecies. He talked about the impending Armageddon. As he told me jokingly,
that’s not Armageddon as in the
movie; rather it’s Armageddon as in “the last battle between good and evil
before the Day of Judgement”.
Ever the detail
oriented one, I asked, “What’s the date for that?” As you might expect, he had
no answer to that question. Instead, he said it would happen right when Israel
was surrounded by everyone else in the world (not just the Islamic world). But
that doesn’t give me a date either, does it? To me, this sounds like the “turtles all the
way down” answer!
This unwillingness
to give a specific date is, of course, not just limited to religious folks. Seth
Godin avoided a date when he talked about believing in yourself and moving
forward with what you believe to be right:
“Sooner or later, your work speaks for
itself.”
Worst of all,
though, are the economists and financial “experts” who talk about things righting
themselves or sanity returning to the stock markets. When? In the long run,
they reply. But as John Maynard Keynes famously countered:
“But this long run is
a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all
dead.”
Besides, nobody
can wait forever. After all, as Keynes said:
“The market can remain irrational longer
than you can remain solvent.”
Keynes said this
about economists, but the point applies to anyone who makes predictions without
a date:
“Economists set themselves too easy, too
useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the
storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.”
In his book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari describes a
level two chaotic system:
“Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to
predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately.”
Economists can use
that as the reason why they can’t predict the economy and/or stock markets
accurately. Of course, that then raises the question as to why they even make
predictions…
But level two
chaos is not a reason that believers can cite about God’s predictions a la the Armageddon one I started this
blog with. After all, isn’t God omnipotent and beyond such interference from
the rest of the universe?
For the Christians it is the Armageddon, which is one of the prophecies. All religions seem to give importance to such things. For the Hindus, the cycling yugas have definite characteristics, hence predictable. But then, nobody is sure about the yuga timings, so it is all subjective rants with infinite ways. I believe that the Muslims have their own prophecies to boost the Muslim ego, if not their morale! I don't know if the Islam prophecy is that everyone will convert to Islam one day! Horrible thing to do, but nothing to worry, I suppose. Prophecies are just whims, as the blog suggests.
ReplyDeleteThe blog ends with, "...God’s predictions a la the Armageddon one I started this blog with", followed by, "after all, isn’t God omnipotent and beyond such interference from the rest of the universe?"
Since, I like discussing God, I feel like adding a comment to the finish line of the blog.
Firstly, there is this question: Who says Armageddon is God's prediction? Some human being has mentioned it as God's own statement and got recorded in the Bible. Who is there to prove whether God said this and God did not say that? We make an image of God that is our mind's projection. We declaring God as omnipotent, and then we feel unhappy that God seems unable to do things. We believe God has to do certain things in order to deserve the title we had given him.
We see things from our limitations and bounds and wish to project an idea of something limitless and declare it as God very often. Actually, we cannot perceive the limitless - we are dealing with an absolute contradiction and we think we are OK with that. Anyway, at least attributing limitlessness is a way of 'defining' God. Unfortunately, none of our thought projections are definitions or truth of God. If we create a God out of our thoughts, sooner or later, that God will crumble because the content was a puffed up thing, not the truth.
In that sense, I too endorse what the blog aims at saying - all prophecies are predictions that are humanly puffed up things. We are better off ignoring them all!