Month: November 2014

Humans Suck

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One of the greatest ironies in all of human history is those preaching greater tolerance while in practice are spewing some of the most vitriolic, hate-filled intolerance that you can read. Perhaps you will not see it that way, but being blind to oneself is a theme that has run throughout of all of human history.

One might think I am about to jump on the bandwagon of Christians commenting with hateful slurs on atheist and nontheist videos, telling them they should die, and saying how happy they are knowing that the atheist will BURN IN HELL for all eternity when they die… But that bandwagon is full of people. Yes that happens, and yes I believe those people need to do some deep introspection before they post another comment to YouTube.

What I am going to talk about is the opposite, and why there will never be peace on Earth even if 49% of the entire population campaign for peace, 50% don’t care, and 1% campaign for war. The reason for that is even among the people that campaign for peace, there will be those who do it in the most aggravating, horrible ways, giving the 1% who want war an avenue for attack.

I have been watching a ton of videos, as always, on the sides both of Christianity and of atheism, and the comments sections are almost perfect mirrors of each other. For every comment of “I hope atheists burn in hell,” on an atheist video, there is an equal comment of “ur an retarded christin and u shuid no ther is no god”. You know what, I want to say I am ashamed to be on the same side of the fence as people who would insult someone’s intelligence flat out like that for no good reason, but then I would be on the same side of the fence as those that profess a loving and merciful God (unless you are gay/nonbeliever/born in a different part of the world/woman/etc). What does it all round out to, then?

It all rounds out to the fact that I am pretty much ashamed to be a human. We are hateful creatures, we remember and stick to pain for much longer than happiness, and we seek our own validation too often from taking happiness away from others.

I do not want to make atheists out of Christians, and I think it is obvious I don’t want to make Christians out of atheists. Hell, if a Christian could restore my belief in God, I don’t think there is anything in the world that could make me happier, but I don’t think that is possible any more. Please, don’t let that stop you, though — perhaps it is through trying that I could believe again. I don’t know. I am not sure.

What I do want to do is to make people realize that everyone on both sides of this argument is a human being with hopes and dreams, with things that make them happy and things that make them sad, with emotions as rich and vibrant as your own… And what people on both sides are doing is spewing a corrosive vitriol that does not chew at the soul of the other person, but at their own soul. For every bit of joy you take from making someone else unhappy, you are sacrificing your… I wanted to write “humanity” there, but that’s not right. You are sacrificing your godliness and reason, and becoming more human, more earthly. For those who read the Christian Bible, I think you should not miss the reference to the Worldly man, here, for those who become Worldly are not of the Father. As it says in 1John chapter 2, renounce worldly things, for the desires of the flesh, and the desires of the eyes, and pride are not of the Father.

For the atheists, it should be noted that by calling Christians names, and attacking their person rather than their argument, you are making yourselves look exactly like what the Christians knew you would be. You are making all nontheists look bad. You are making all atheists look bad. You are proving to Christians that without God, we are evil beings.

Elevate the conversation; Christians, love thy neighbor, atheists, prove that there is some good in humanity. I know there are good Christians and good Atheists, but the bad tend to shout so much louder. If you know someone who is spitting corrosive acid into their own better nature, talk to them about it, make them see (reason/God).

Until then, I will continue to try to renounce my humanity, but being as I am currently stuck as a human, I am having troubles with that idea.

Words are Hard

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You know what’s funny is how often people will use a word to describe themselves when almost no one can agree what that word means.

For the purposes of my own ongoing narrative, there are four words that people use, three of which no one agrees on. The first of the four, and the one that is easiest to define, is theist. A theist believes in a God or gods. A theist Christian believes in the Biblical God, for example.

Now we enter muddy waters, and what I am about to tell you is not a strong definition but my own personal use of the words. Let’s start with agnostic. This is a weird one, actually, as gnostic generally means seeker of knowledge, or just knowledge… So to be agnostic would, from an etymological reading, be a person who denies seeking knowledge. Like Astrology, however, the meaning of the word’s roots has been dropped over time, and now an agnostic is a person who does claim knowledge of theistic truths. That bears some additional definition, I fear.

It is sometimes said that a person is a “teapot agnostic”, which evokes the narrative of Bertrand Russell’s space teapot. Russell, a late nineteenth-early twentieth century atheist, once posited that there was a teapot floating around in space, and it was his right to believe in it because you could not prove that it did not exist. To prove that it did not exist would be to make a constantly evolving, exhaustive map of the entire solar system at all point simultaneously (the teapot moves, obviously). A teapot agnostic, therefore, is said to believe that the likelihood of God existing is comparable to that of the teapot; very unlikely, but possible.

Atheist, then, is a word I use to describe those that believe, actively, that there is no God. These are the people who tell religious people they are wrong, and that they should update their thought processes and stop being so… So wrong! I am not this thing, or at least, I would not describe myself this way. I certainly am not one who holds to the belief that there is no God.

Nontheist is a somewhat newer word, though I do not know the detailed etymological history of it. I know for a fact that it has been in frequent use since the 90s, and was used by Richard Dawkins in his 2002 TED talk on atheism.. But to me, it signifies something slightly different than atheist. To me, a nontheist is not someone who believes there is no God, or believes in a God, they are just someone who does not believe in a God. That… That is admittedly a very difficult statement to explain, and very difficult to understand, and it took me many years to iron down even the way I felt, let alone a word to use to describe it.

How to describe it without sounding atheist or agnostic? I don’t even truly know. I certainly do not have an active belief that there is no God. I am certainly partially agnostic, but not in the traditional “Could be or not could be,” sense. I just… Don’t believe there is a God (or, perhaps, a Personal God who cares what I think or do on a daily, moment-by-moment basis). I am sorry, even to me this is a deeply unsatisfying definition. In my head it evokes a wide-reaching set of ideas and feelings that I seem not to be able to put into words.

Anyway, words are hard. That’s really the point here.

Radical Anti-Felinism

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For context, the wording of this post should be noted as a direct satire of this.

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The reality of our oppression is so erased that we tend to forget that real persecution, captivity, and control are what prevents us from freeing ourselves from cats, not just the effects it has in our head: even though breaking us down mentally is one of the intended effects of our oppression. Our freedom lies very concretely in cats no longer being able to assail us, not in gaining more understanding of cats. Intentional cat dominance isn’t just something in our head we need to get rid of by becoming anti-felinists, but outside ourselves, real, something we have to concretely escape and free ourselves from.

Liberal humans in modern homes say cats are “companions”, “friendly”, and “cuddly”, because they project their own feelings of loneliness onto cats and accept what is otherwise a parasitic relationship, and erase the idea of the mental torture that goes into the felinarchy that controls them. They believe our torture is something imaginary and symmetrical, that cats love us as much as we love them, as if we are equally influenced by “pets” and “cuteness”, as if our subjugation were not merely opportunistic cats abusing our better nature, as it we aren’t brainwashed by toxoplasma gondii, unwittingly controlled by them. We thus play a part in reproducing the issue of cat control by sharing pictures of them, videos of them doing cute things, not because we want to, but because we are forced to.

I know most rantifels (the word I just made up to describe radical anti-felinists, of which I am the first (and possibly only)) are on board with criticism of cats. The problem is, most don’t even realize the oppression isn’t symmetrical; it is even reinforced by those subjugated by cats. This is felinarchal (cat overlord) reversal. Cats take the moment we are already colonised and captive to say “see, there’s symmetry! I feed and provide a home for her, and she loves me!” This omits the decades of carefully planned domestication of humans by cats that their race had to execute in order to obtain this result.

Even if we look at things purely from the perspective of ideas, they aren’t equally shared by humans and cats, nor is there the same power in turning beliefs into reality. We have the ability to observe that cat’s influence over us, and yet we somehow choose to ignore it. When cats believe that there is a felinarchy, it exists. There’s a coherence and integrity between cat’s felinarchal beliefs and their actions; they abuse this position of power they have over us. If they believe humans should be treated as “warmth batteries” and “food dispensers”, they will effectively treat humans as such. If cats believe that a human’s home is just a place to be looted for their own continued ends, they will force humans to treat them as gods. That’s because they have the oppressive power to enforce their felinistic beliefs and turn them into actions!

One thing that is important in free choice is knowledge. People can’t make free choices until they understand that they are infected with toxoplasma gondii. You wouldn’t choose to own a pet if you knew it would poison you! BUT IT’S TOO LATE! If someone gave you a pet, telling you it is cute and cuddly, it can’t be said you accepted the pet knowing it would become your feliarchal overlord. The choice you thought you were making was only to accept a loving, lovable pet into your home. You accepted the cat out of deception.

Knowledge is something the oppressors reserve for themselves, to maintain their oppressive system. Cats know their domination. They know they’re the dominant species and need to exclude humans from it, and know how to treat cats and humans distinctively to maintain this dominance. It’s very clear to them what constitutes an affront to them and what doesn’t. While they might not know all the ins and outs of the felinarchal system, they do know perfectly well where their interests lie–in keeping humans subservient to them–and know how to go about doing it. And that’s all they need to know. Access to this knowledge is part of their birth-right, and transmitted to humans by other animals, before they even entered the home.

This isn’t so for humans. We don’t “share” their ideology and reproduce it willingly against ourselves and other humans, as the intents and workings of felinarchy aren’t clear to us at all (ok, maybe it is). We simply don’t have access to the knowledge (or maybe we do). Cats prevent us from seeing it by excluding us from their rituals (and best know they have rituals) where they openly laugh at their dominance over humans, where the important decisions are made, where all the crucial knowledge and skills are transmitted and where they bond over degradation of humans (hahahaha, they clean our poop!).

Cats don’t even hide their true intentions; anyone with an open mind can see the open contempt in their eyes. They do, at the least, know how to fake love, interest, cuteness, to fake the emotions that should make good pets, they know how to reverse reality (we are their pets), to blur our perceptions. They do, however, have a very clear vision of what they’re subjecting us to and why they’re doing it, while they methodically destroy our consciousness of their own actions against us, as well as all material that could be used as evidence of their organized crimes.

It takes us a considerable amount of effort, millennia to unpick the lies from the truth (they’ve been our masters since the times of ancient Egypt). It will take a cat a split nano-second to react and know what to do to make us still believe they love us. All they have to do is roll over onto their back and purr, and all our thoughts of their evil, domineering ways are forgotten.

In this condition it can’t even be said that humans believe in the felinarchy and thus won’t choose to get out of it, but that our consciousness of cat’s control over our reality has been deliberately disintegrated by evolution. We are prevented from even wanting to get out. We are cut from the information we need to see the whole picture, to see cat’s sinister conspiracy against humans. Cats know how to oppress, they have been doing it for a very long time. In this condition of forced confusion it can’t be said we consent to anything they subject us to.

The game is rigged for humans. Cats need toxoplasma gondii to deceive us, play tricks on our minds. They use it to keep us obedient and confused. And they expect us to believe it is spread unwittingly, as though there is not an open conspiracy between species to have humans serve cats! Such psychic warfare saves them a great deal of coercive effort.

Cats are devious and ethically crapulent (have you ever seen them play with their food?!), they will never, ever attack us on level ground. Imagine if cats came up to humans and instead of pretending to “love” us, just said outright “my only intention is to use you to provide me oxytocin, food, and shelter, and then use you to take care of my every want and whim, to slap you in the face. Slavery is the most barbaric thing you can do to a human being, and I intend to make you my slave. I will make you a slave for the rest of my life, and for the life of many cats who come after me. You may think I am making you happy, but I am using you until I am done with you. Now open your door and make me a damn sandwich.”

We’d never let that happen. All of a sudden they wouldn’t seem so cute. It would complicate cat’s business of enslaving us, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, in Another Universe

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I’ve posted about radical feminism before, and actually this specific feminist in particular… And while I recognized that she has managed to create a nearly self-contained universe where she is scorned beyond all measure by a universally negative force, I never truly understood the mechanism she believes is at work. Thankfully, a recent post of hers managed to clear that notion up for me in some semi-satisfactory way. That is to say, what she believes is happening is impossible in a world where humans live; she expects that 50% of the planet gets together and has 100% unanimity of cause.

Do you think I am exaggerating? I will assume you haven’t read the post I linked, I wouldn’t either if it weren’t for a nearly insatiable curiosity in my soul. To that end, I will give an excerpt for your enjoyment:

“[Women] don’t “share” [men’s] ideology and reproduce it in turn, against ourselves, as the intents and workings of patriarchy aren’t clear to us at all: we simply don’t have access to the same information as them. Men prevent us from seeing it by excluding us from their institutions, boards, meetings, parties, peer networks, forums, rituals, clubs where they openly exchange about their dominance, where the important decisions are made, where all the crucial knowledge and skills are transmitted and where they bond over sexual degradation of women in the most overt ways (mostly prostituted women).”

Now perhaps I am reading it incorrectly, but if I am maybe someone can help me. It sounds like she believes that men get together, all of us, merely to talk about how we are oppressing women, methods we use, what works and what doesn’t, stories about the women we have oppressed specifically, among ten thousand other sordid details. Further, fathers pass this information, she says, to their sons, teaching them to dominate women emotionally and physically, but does not share any of this with their daughters.

I do not hate this woman, I am merely baffled. How can we hope to even open a dialog to help them as the world stands? If she honestly believes that anything any male says, regardless of time and place, is explicitly crafted to instill the illusion that there is no such thing as an absolute patriarchy? The post itself opens with this quote:

“Liberal men in modern Western totalitarian regimes (which they call democracies) say we are ‘socialised’, ‘educated’ into … ‘patriarchal values’…”

Alright, to get this out of the way first, I have NEVER heard anyone, male or female, speak about forced socialization and education into a regime outside of Marxist fiction (unless she thinks 1984 by George Orwell was a documentary…?).

Second, I don’t even know what “patriarchal values” means, in all honesty. I also don’t know how women are educated into them, these are all things that she seems to assume are taken for granted as common knowledge among those who exist outside of the patriarchy. That, if you will forgive the irony, is an application of the exact same stripping of knowledge that she so vehemently accuses men of using to control women. How can we fight back if we don’t even know what we are fighting?

Plenty of people will (and have) told me that even wanting to open a dialog with people such as Witch Wind is a silly idea, that they could not be spoken to in any case. I’d generally equate that to saying “Well, they could be helped, but are they really worth the effort?”

I want to bring more happiness into the world than I take out of it, and many radical feminists seem to be deeply unhappy people. I can see where they are coming from; if you literally believed that 99% of the world stands starkly against you (100% of the males, and 98% of the females who have accepted the idea of the patriarchy as the standard way of the world), you would likely be unhappy to.

Maybe I could never get through to 99% of radical feminists, but if even one saw that their beliefs stood in absolute contrast to the real world, if even one opened up and saw that the entire world was not against them, then I have brought some happiness into the world (or, at the very least, taken some unhappiness out of it, but the math is startlingly similar).

I know you will get the pingback, Witch Wind. I know you probably get thousands of them, most making fun of you. But honestly, even if I could never hope to make you trust a man, I really want to know how you believe that 100% of any group of people are able to come to some unanimous conclusion that oppressing an entire 50% of the Earth’s population is a good thing? I mean, even slavery, which was the perfect economic system (from a financial standpoint) was struck down because too many people could not stand the constant oppressing of another. Though almost no whips and chains were wielded against the north by the south, the Union came together to stamp out the systematic oppression thousands of people.

Do you think that there are men out there who could stand by and let so many be oppressed? That 100% of men could enjoy it? I am just confused.

I mean, I would like to believe the entirety of your wordpress history is an elaborate trolling of anyone who reads it, but I just… I don’t know. *Shrug*

I just don’t know.

On Inconsistent Scoring Scales

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Formal debate is not something to be watched by the masses. The problem is that, with a formal debate, the viewer is left to make their own conclusions on what they just saw, and each person will score it according to their own biases and views. This is, of course, by design — while trying to convince each other, you are also trying to convince the watchers.

Because of this you are left with a strange fallout to any debate, whether political, religious, or just about whether Goku and Vegeta could defeat every hero in the Marvel universe with only the two of them (obviously, they could). The fallout, though, is that you end up with figureheads on either side, trying to convince people who share their views that their side won. Obviously, both sides cannot “win”, there is no “win condition.” Perhaps one side persuaded more people to join their side than the other, but a score of 55-45 in something like a debate is not something that, to me, constitutes a win; maybe I don’t even want a winner, I just want more information.

I am going to choose a recently televised and WILDLY popular debate as an example; Ken Ham versus Bill Nye. Those in the Creation camp have said Ken won, those in the science camp said Nye won (statistically speaking, Ken Ham won the United States while Bill Nye won most of the world, just given various poll numbers), but I don’t know if either person really changed anyone’s mind. People already in the Creation camp were going into the debate knowing Ken would win, people who stood on the side of science had decided Bill’s victory prior to the debate, and as for Ham himself, he went in knowing Bill could not change his mind, and Bill went in knowing Ham could not change his mind. Hell, they didn’t even formally debate, now that I remember back to any of the formal debates I have taken part in (I was in Debate Club in high school), as they didn’t rebut each other almost at all. They made their own points, presented their own views (part one of a debate), and then halfheartedly spoke to the points of the other before answering audience questions. The thing even about the audience questions is that they each answered in their own way, again very seldom referencing the answer of the other.

But the interesting thing is what happens after this debate, or really any debate.

Creation Today dedicated two episodes of their show and podcast to telling everyone how much Ken Ham totally won. Reddit and 4Chan, two of the largest (but certainly not the only) bastions of progressive thought (and havens for atheists (alternate reading: echo chamber for atheists)) proclaimed that Nye won the debate so handily that it was as though Ham didn’t even show up.

I know I am not the average viewer, and the problem is that most people don’t bother to even look at the other side (the lay person certainly). The problem is not the figureheads, not at the root, the problem is a complacent population. Your average person in the Creation camp will see that everyone on his side is saying Ham won, and become even more entrenched in his belief that Creationism is truly the Truth and the word of God. Do you know what this means? This means that, just for having the debate, Bill Nye has helped bolster the Creation crowd. Conversely, the already science-based crowd will be firmer in their own beliefs. How many people changed their mind, or made their mind up as a result of that debate? I’d argue that it was a handful at best. That being said, if you are on the fence on this issue, I won’t lie; there is lots of charisma on the Creation side, and their data (at a glance) looks very convincing (though if you go and do independent research, you will find that it falls apart under close scrutiny, and that almost all of their science has been disproved (and I only say almost because we still don’t know how life started, not exactly)). If that debate found more converts for Creation than for science, a little bit of reason died in the world.

And that is why I think that one of two things should happen. Either you go Richard Dawkins’ path, and reject all debates (for what is the point if you know you are not going to change minds), or just take the argument off the table of “entertainment”, for that is what the Ham/Nye debate really added up to.

That isn’t to say stop fighting, it is just to say that we should stop fighting, but we need to make it not a spectacle of charisma but a war of reason, of minds, and of data. Data can lead to differing conclusions, but data itself cannot be falsified. Whether you say that the sediment layers in the grand canyon are evidence of a global flood or of a river eroding the valley over millions of years, you still have the undeniable FACT that there are layers of sediment there. And you know what? I am happy to let true geologists publish papers explaining how they got there; I am not qualified to say *how it happened*, but I am qualified to say that an OVERWHELMING majority of geologists agree on how it happened, and I am happy to listen to the near consensus.

You can side with 3% of scientists who disagree with the other 97%, that is a freedom you are certainly afforded… But if you are siding with that same 3% because Ken Ham (whose highest level of scientific literacy is that of a school teacher, which he will happily tell you) told you to, I believe you have erred in exercising your brain’s astounding capacity for discovery. You are not discovering anything, you are just doing as a parrot does, and echoing information told to you by someone who is incapable of forming an academic opinion on the subject. I will, of course, freely admit that I, too, am acting the parrot, but I am parroting those with incredible depth of knowledge in that specific subject.

The above is a deep reason why I believe that the battle between science and religion should not be a spectacle of entertainment, it should be a battle of the greatest minds, a chess match behind closed doors, and I believe that once the match is won (as I believe in some arenas it has been), the winner can be simply and easily declared by viewing not the match itself, but the chess board after game; seeing the player who has the other in checkmate. There is no argument, no speculation, no 3rd move guessing as to who will win in the end, just an outcome.

The loser will admit loss, the winner will declare victory, and it won’t be a spectacle any more.

But maybe I just want a perfect world, and maybe I am asking too much.

I am sorry.

Anime is Weird

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The title says it all, but does need clarification.

Who was it that started the North American Otaku revolution? Who went to Japan, said “You know, these cartoons are amazing. I should hire some really bad voice actors, not learn any editing techniques, and then air them back in my home country!”?

Then, after this process began, bad voice acting included, who was it that was like “These bad voice actors, animation quality eclipsed by our animators in the 40s, the nearly nonsensical plots, these are what truly constitutes the pinnacle of art!”

Don’t get me wrong, I love anime. I have a premium subscription to Crunchy Roll ($8/mo, same price as Netflix, but specializes ONLY in anime). Storytelling is very different in Japan, which is about the most level headed review anyone can give it. It isn’t that it is a bad thing or a good thing, it is just that Hollywood (and almost all North American storytelling) follows a very tight “plot schedule”. You probably learned about it in Junior High or High School, you have your rising action, your climax, your denouement, your resolution. Japan saw that graph, decided it didn’t have NEARLY enough peaks and valleys (read: it had none), crumpled it up and used it as toilet paper, then went on to make stories that have a much wider emotional scope than your traditional western entertainment, with mighty peaks and valleys that may (at times) dip into Hades itself.

The funny thing is that there are many other countries that have produced some truly incredible entertainment. Among people who like art, you will be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t seen the 1957 Swedish masterpiece “The Seventh Seal”. I have watched it myself, and quite enjoyed it. But that’s it, that is the extent of Swedish entertainment I have seen. Obviously they know how to make a good movie; I’ve seen it.

How about Asterix and Obelix? They are made by the French company Gaumont, and are quite good. At best, though, they are considered a bit of a cult classic. That isn’t to say they aren’t good, as Asterix in Britain is still one of my favorite movies of all time; it isn’t purely nostalgia, either — When you watch something purely out of nostalgia, some of the magic fades, but the subtle (and sometimes overt) racism in that movie transcends time itself (It is made by the French, and takes so many pot shots at the British I’m surprised they didn’t declare war). I watch it frequently, and still laugh at the jokes about British weather (“Is it always foggy here?” “Oh, my, no! Only when it isn’t raining!”), or the jokes about how ridiculous a sport Rugby is. The constant ongoing dialogue about how gross (OR DELICIOUS!) warm beer is, and the idea that you can acquire a taste for anything if you have the stomach for it! (“Have some roasted boar covered in mint sauce! With a side of warm beer!”)

This is more a walk down the lane of one of my favorite movies, and I apologize for getting a little side tracked. The point is, the whole series is pretty funny, even down to the naming (The Great Druid Getafix [say his name slowly, hopefully you’ll get it faster than I did, because I maintain that I was barely functional when I was a child]). So why isn’t there a giant following of French entertainment? Why is there an Edmonton Animethon, a convention held at Grant MacEwan, attended by over 10,000 people, and yet if you talk about “Foreign Film Festival” herein Edmonton, you will have to go to the Garneau theater and sit as far as you can from any one of the other 30 hipsters who showed up to watch it?

What made Speed Racer, Astro Boy, and Kimba the White Lion stand out? (Kimba the White Lion was stolen WHOLESALE by Disney and turned into “The Lion King”. They never really bothered to hide it, as Kimba was remembered by approximately 4 people when the 90s rolled around) Those were the first three anime that were presented to English audiences. When I watch the original Speed Racer, I nearly go blind from how bad the animation quality is (its varied and numerous remakes are pretty cool, though).

Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my mind. *Shrug*

No point to this post, really. Just thinking out loud.

The Mathematics of Prophecy

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Another thing I’ve seen mentioned before, but thought very little of, is the mathematics of prophecy. I thought “Meh, it’s just a few people that even the more dogmatic people are like ‘Ehhhhh… I don’t know him.'” But as I looked into some more prophecy stuff for one of my posts last week, I came across it again, and I was left (suitably, I think) confused by the whole enterprise.

I’m using two sources for this article, but it doesn’t really matter which I use; the whole enterprise is silly in both cases.

http://www.reasons.org/articles/articles/fulfilled-prophecy-evidence-for-the-reliability-of-the-bible

http://www.lamblion.com/articles/articles_bible6.php

To really point out the fun times I had researching this, I am going to try to use only prophecies that are mentioned in both writings.

First, the book of Zechariah chapter 11; in this book, 30 pieces of silver are paid to Zechariah for his having tended a flock of sheep (literal sheep, near as I can tell, but perhaps they are people sheep). In any case, for some reason, someone paying Zechariah 30 pieces of silver (and with no mention of a future Messiah in the whole chapter) counts of prophecy (WHO KNEW?!). The first linked article has this prophecy being fulfilled as a 1 in 10^11 (that is, 1 in 100,000,000,000). Wow! So unlikely!

The other article, citing the same source (Zechariah 11:12-13) has that SAME prophecy as 1 in 1000. That’s… That’s quite a swing in estimates. Neither show work, so I can’t even really comment on which one is closer. WE MOVE ON!

The next common prophecy is the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem. The first cites 1 in 10,000, the second 2.8 in 10,000. Well, they are pretty close there, though the historicity of Jesus having been born in Bethlehem is in doubt. If Joseph was actually there for a census, as the Bible states, one would think there would be a very strong record of Jesus of Nazareth being born there, but we are out of luck on that count (Jesus is not mentioned in the census primarily because A) That is not how censuses in Roman territories were conducted, and B) there is no evidence for a census having been taken at the time of Jesus’ birth. Biblical literalists have to do some fun gymnastics on this point, but we are talking about math here).

Here’s another fun one; Psalm 22:16 (frequently cited, and one I cited just recently). The Messiah will have his hands and feet pierced. The first cites a chance of 1 in 10^13 (10,000,000,000,000) as Crucifixion hadn’t been invented yet. The second cites 1 in 100,000. The weird thing is that this is cited as “clear evidence” that the prophets knew Jesus would be crucified. Well, that doesn’t sound like crucifixion to me, though it is odd that he would have had his hands and feet nailed to the cross as this was not standard procedure — but we have very little evidence stating that he was nailed there outside of the Gospels (read: no evidence at all). That being said, if you have full faith in the Gospels, I can see why you’d think it was a fulfillment of this prophecy… But here’s the thing; we can call that prophecy in hindsight, as we know how Jesus died… But if you were a Jew in, say, 15 CE (after Jesus’ birth, but before his ministry), what are the chances you would read the passage saying “his hands and feet will be pierced”, and think “Oh yeah, they’ll clearly nail him to a cross, even though crucifixion is generally performed by tying them to the cross. Makes perfect sense. I’ll watch for a Messiah that gets nailed to a cross.”

See, there is a reason that the Jewish people do not accept Jesus as the savior; he does not fit the prophecies. As much as Christian hindsight and wordplay say “he is the Messiah because prophecy,” they can really only connect those dots when they already have the answer (think of a connect the dots figure where the dots aren’t numbered, but someone has already drawn the picture). The prophecies are great, but only when you already have the answer.

One that is cited as prophecy (and one of the VERY FEW prophecies that actually claim to be prophecies (rather than about the writer himself)) is from the book of Daniel Chapter 9, verse 25-26. The odd thing is that the passage itself reads “69 ‘sevens’ will pass’, and for some reason this is supposed to be “years” according to … People? I guess? I read it as 69 weeks, but maybe I am, again, the crazy one.

Perhaps it is just my closed mind not understanding prophecy correctly.. But even the prophecy stating “He will ride into the city lowly, on a donkey,” also states that he will do it as the king of a kingdom that stretches from sea-to-sea. At the time of Jesus riding into the city, he was only known as an itinerant preacher. He sent his disciples on ahead of him to work up the crowds, and even then you would be hard pressed to stretch his reputation as far as to say “There is a king riding a donkey.” At best you’d have “Huh. It’s weird that a rabbi is riding a donkey, but everyone else seems excited, so I’m on board.”

In any case, and like I said, there are a few things that make these prophecies falter. First, pretty much everything quoted from Zechariah is out of context. The prophecy in Psalms is misrepresented. Malachi’s prophecy didn’t even come true (or, if it did, no history ever recorded it). Even with all that in mind, to even start to do the acrobatics required to make all of these puzzle pieces fit together, you have to assume that the Gospels record a literal history. After assuming the Gospels are literal history, you then have to make further jumps to connect the out of context passages (they don’t even claim to be prophecies) to the life of Jesus.

It’s a lot of work. Maybe it’s not the chances that Jesus would fulfill the prophecies that is 1 in 10^17… Maybe it was the chances that someone would look at the Old Testament and shoe horn it all together, then have billions of people believe it despite a stunning lack of evidence.

That makes more sense, at least to me.

What Did I Miss?

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Anti-Evolution Video Goes Viral

So this video is 12 minutes and 15 seconds long, and shows a pregnancy from the moment of male ejaculation (don’t worry, you don’t see any grown up genitalia) until the moment of delivery. Creation Today says that this is an anti-evolution video, but I don’t see it. I am pretty sure science is perfectly willing to say “A baby is formed when a sperm meets an ovum, and 9 months later the woman will pass a watermelon through a golfball sized hole.”

So maybe I missed something. Maybe there is some subliminal message in the video?

If anyone understands why this video is “Anti-Evolution” please let me know?

How do I Prophecy?

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In 5.4 billion years, the sun will exit its main sequence and expand rapidly into a red giant. This will (provided Earth is still intact and inhabited) sear the surface of the Earth killing any life remaining.

In roughly 4 billion years, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy will pass through each other (often called a collision, but it is unlikely any actual matter will collide). This will cause the night sky to be incredibly dynamic and bright, dwarfing any celestial activity we currently observe.

At some point in the future, preceded by a period of peace, there will be some natural phenomenon, unrest, and the end of the world as we know it. It will be caused by a person who is a leader (or maybe not a leader) that everyone likes (at first) but then doesn’t like. This person might mark people.

***

Above, I have included three predictions about the future. Two of them have the year it will happen, the conditions of its happening, and the effects of its happening. The top two predictions were made by humans, using only information we are able to see with our eyes, today.

The third prediction is vague, the details unclear, the outcome foggy, and the cause relatively unknown. It was, if you are a believer, given to us by the inspiration of a Creator who can see the future as clearly as if it were a bright light in front of His eyes. The systems in effect obey his slightest whim, and everything is as He wants it.

So why are the predictions made by men, which are predicting events further in the future, more accurate and detailed than the predictions of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God?

How about something more specific? Predictions regarding global warming, and the causes of global warming, are incredibly detailed and well sourced. They have predicted changes from the 1950s to today, and are making increasingly accurate predictions for increasingly wide time scales. Currently, there are some very good predictions that are standing the test of time that project to 2100AD. It is worth noting that they are also region based, meaning that the delta temperature on Antarctica will be different than at the Equator (and located at several points in between).

“There are over 2400 prophecies in the Bible, of which 2000 have already come true.” You know, I have read this statement a ton of times recently, but I never really thought about what it means. Science has made thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of predictions, that have come true. Science is willing to admit mistakes, maybe that is why there are so many Christians who find it so easy to ignore the science they don’t like, agree with, or understand — never mind the fact that there are books and books dedicated to which prophecies in the Bible got major details wrong (or have never shown the slightest evidence of coming true)… There are also many books dedicated to the prophecies that the Bible got right, as well, so it’s tough to find the exact numbers (and certain factions saying “100% of all Bible prophecies are 100% true” really skews the numbers).

So my question is this… What’s the difference between what science says about the future, with clear details, clear outcomes, and clear causes, and what prophecy says about the future (often vague, no date given, and can be applied to many different situations)?

Why is science, which can show its work, considered by so many to be less reliable?

I don’t know, I was just thinking about it today.