Templates

Thinking about Harold Camping's end of the world prediction has caused me to think about the reasons "we" hold on to so many odd ideas. I think it is the way we look at the world. Each of us has assumptions about the world, our ways of looking at the world. Most people tend to be in the same political party as their parents. They look at the world with Democratic or Republican eyes. We also tend to belong to whatever religion we were raised in. Our whole world view is inherited. Or course this is not true for everyone, but as a general rule it seems true. Our culture makes us what we are.

Our world view, what I am going to call our templates, is how we perceive the facts around us. Part of leaving Babylon is to understand that our templates are corroded by our cultural inheritances and our past decisions. It is difficult to look at the world fresh, but absolutely necessary. As Socrates supposedly said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In my first podcast I will talk about some of the templates people use to interpret the book of Revelation—some  false, some true. I know you can hardly wait! But until then if you want to think about our religious templates you can consider the template of hell. "Our" view of hell is derived, not from the Bible but from our culture, even including cartoons. So while you are breathlessly waiting until I do the first podcast next week, you should consider Pam Dewey's blog on Hell. She is trying to show us how to peel back the learned false assumptions we have about hell by looking at how we got to where we are today in our pop culture view of the afterlife.  

 Is this True?                

Prophecy Podcast Episode Zero

The podcast is very much a work in progress. Not perfect, but I wanted to publish it as it concerns the May 21 rapture-so this has a limited shelf life! 

Prophecy Podcast Episode Zero

Update on Friday, May 20, 2011 at 1:29AM by [Positive Dennis]

While I doubt many of my readers will be deceived by the rapture occurring tomorrow, My friend Pam Dewey has posted on her prophecy blog about the impending rapture. 

No Man Knows

I have found two interesting links related to Bible Prophecy. Both are about Harold Camping, who for the second time is predicting the return of Jesus and the rapture. His previous failure in the 1990’s has not discouraged him.

Liberty Magazine comments:

Jesus knew about this. He told his followers that no man knows the day or the hour of his Return, but that people would always be running around predicting it (Mark 13:32, Luke 21:8–9). The failed predictions, which seemed so snazzy before they failed, wouldn’t really be perceived as failures, because the failures wouldn’t be remembered, or considered interesting enough to be remembered. Watch out for predictions, he said. 

Naturally as a Libertarian magazine they approach this from other failed predictions, especially economic predictions. Stephen Cox makes an interesting point about why people keep getting fooled by this kind of error. The reason is that there are always fresh people to be deceived, or as P.T. Barnum famously DIDN’T say “There is a sucker born every minute.” I was fooled by this kind of thing in the 70’s so I am not likely to repeat. 

My friend and fellow blogger Pam Dewey commented on Camping in one of her blogs:

Essentially, Camping has convinced his supporters to see a large number of factors moving inexorably toward a target of the date of May 21 for the rapture, much as a “perfect storm” moves inexorably toward a tragic landfall. (perfect storm: …an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically… also used to describe a hypothetical hurricane that happens to hit at a region’s most vulnerable area, resulting in the worst possible damage by a hurricane of its magnitude.) According to Camping, there’s no denying it is coming precisely when he has predicted, and no holding it back. Once it has come and gone … and all True Christians (according to Camping’s standards) are gone… all that is left for those Left Behind to do, is to wait for the final Perfect Storm to destroy the world on October 21. 

 
I am always amazed by the fact that so many Christians do not believe what Jesus said on a number of topics. Cox mentioned that so many ignored what Jesus said about his return in his article. Here is Matthew’s version of it:

         24:36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the                    angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

The arrogance of someone thinking they know something that Jesus did not know is breath-taking. Whether he comes on May 21, or not, in truth it does not really matter, for our response should be the same. We should be ready. We should be in the world, yet not of the world. We need to be leaving Babylon the great, step by step.

Watch this space! As an internal note I do plan a podcast soon. This is, after all, the Prophecy Podcast!

I also wish to thank Pam Dewey for her help with this blog. Without her help and support this blog would not exist. Thanks Pam. 

Fool Me Once ...

The current mania about the imminent end of society reminds me of a scene from Star Trek where Scotty gets deceived.

From the Wikipedia summery of the episode 40 Friday's Child:

Meanwhile the Enterprise receives a distress call from the S.S. Deirdre. Mr. Scott takes the Enterprise out of orbit to find the ship, but when it arrives at the coordinates, he finds nothing. He notes the call strangely asked for the Enterprise by name, and no civilian ship would have direct knowledge of the Enterprise's whereabouts. Realizing he had been duped he races back to Capella IV, but receives another distress signal along the way, this time from the U.S.S. Carolina. Scotty ignores it saying "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."

Have you ever been fooled? I was in the early 70's about the end of the world. I read books like Famine 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive? by William and Paul Paddock,  and The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich.  These books predicted that millions would starve during the 1970's. Only America could save some. Mostly they proposed that America "write-off" countries that were doomed--countries like China and India. These very countries are now booming and this is now a big problem for the good ol’ USA.

No doubt 100 years from now there will be books that declare:  Famine 2075! China's Decision: Who will survive? Here is the first sentence from Erlich's book:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate ...

A decade later Paul Ehrlich made a bet with futurist Julian Simon. Ehrlich picked 5 metals. He "purchased" $200 of each of these metals. At the end of ten years Ehrlich discovered that the prices of the 5 metals had declined and he sent Simon a check for $576.07. The doomsters have been consistently wrong for 100 years, although few of them failed as spectacularly as Paul Ehrlich.

Oddly enough, the main reason that Simon won the bet had nothing to do with the issues he and Ehrlich disagreed on. It was more a function of Paul Volker's monetary policy. I expect that if a similar bet were placed today the outcome would be quite different, especially factoring in the inevitable inflation we will have over the next few years. Ben Bernanke is no Paul Volker.

The irony is that while Ehrlich would win that bet in 2021, he would win for the exact opposite reason that Ehrlich predicts (he still fights the "good" fight of the 60's). It will not be because of the poverty of India and China, it will be because of the millions who are entering the middle class in these countries, and they want meat (well maybe not the Hindus). They want iPods (and the Chinese make them!). It is the wealth of these countries, not their poverty, that will raise commodity prices.