It's September 24, 2017. The world was supposed to end yesterday. Obviously, it didn't. No astronomers posted that a giant planet has just popped out of nowhere and is heading our way. The only threat to our continued existence seems to be Donald Trump's "I've got a bigger dick than Kim Jong Un" campaign. It's just life as usual.
Sure, planetary collisions are possible. Most astrophysicists figure that's where the moon came from. Something planet size, or nearly so, collided with the young earth and the impact spewed out enough material to form the moon. But it should also be obvious that, if there was a threat of this happening today, someone would have seen the rogue planet approaching long before now.
I used a type of planetary collision to explain how modern people had managed to forget a previous technological civilisation in Returning. There it was a small moon coming out of orbit after it collided head-on with an asteroid and lost just enough forward speed for its orbit to decay. It made quite a mess and killed off nearly everyone.
That was fiction, obviously. But the chap predicting yesterday's destruction was treating it as an inevitable fact. Or he was. He's apparently changed his mind, now that nothing happened. Slight miscalculation of the date. This wasn't what Daniel meant after all.
These predictions are usually biblical, and most of them tend to be based on Daniel and Revelation. Christians love to cite Daniel because they can find so many fulfilled prophecies in that book. They ignore some basic details, however. The most obvious of these is that, to the best we can determine, Daniel was written after the events it predicted had already happened. Saying this is true prophecy is a bit like me predicting that President McKinley is going to be assassinated, then backdating it to 1870. Jesus predicted the Jerusalem Temple would be destroyed, but no one seems to have written this down until well after the Romans had destroyed it.
The Jews, by the way, have never considered Daniel to be a prophet, which is why that book is including in the Writings, the least authoritative of the three sections of the Jewish scriptures. It's in the same section as Job, which was acknowledged to be fiction at the time it was included in the canon, and Esther, which gives every appearance of being an early romance novel. Certainly nothing in Esther actually happened or, if it did, the numbers, and her status, are wildly exaggerated.
Revelation, the other popular source of apocalyptic predictions, is just nuts. It's the sort of thing a hippie might come up with after a pot and LSD binge lasting several days. In any case, its predictions are tied in with the Roman Empire, so obviously none of them came true, and the time when it could have any possible meaning is long past.
Most religions are somewhat ridiculous, particularly if you look at them from the outside. The basis of Christianity, for example, is that God created everything, but got mad when the first man and woman disobeyed him and ate the wrong piece of fruit, so he burdened them, and all of their descendants, with Original Sin, meaning everyone was condemned to spend eternity in Hell (despite the little detail that no one ever heard of the place until the New Testament). Later, feeling a bit sorry for these poor people, he knocked up a virgin, who then gave birth to Jesus, who was really God, and then sacrificed himself to himself as expiation for original sin. Naturally, he then resurrected his dead self, had himself preach about himself for a few days, and then took himself up into heaven, where he could sit next to himself on the heavenly throne.
The way this is celebrated is, of course, to have his worshipers take communion, a ritual in which they cannibalize Jesus and drink his blood. Protestants do this symbolically. Catholics, thanks to transubstantiation, do it literally, even though the literal flesh and blood still taste like wine and bread.
If you take what's really just fiction, and try to draw a prediction from it, you're generally going to come up short. No doubt there are historically accurate things in the Bible, but there are also plenty of events chronicled there that never actually happened. Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, Jesus' resurrection. There's no independent confirmation of any of these. There was never a first man or woman, just a point along the evolutionary line where humans who would be capable of breeding with modern humans began to diverge from those who couldn't. But it wasn't a discrete point. There would have been an overlap of hundreds of generations. Noah was probably extrapolated from some local flood, perhaps from legendary tales brought down from the time the Mediterranean basin filled up. In any case, Noah was stolen from earlier stories.
As for Jesus' resurrection, it was accompanied by all sorts of miraculous events that no one seemed to notice at the time, nor would they be noticed until after most potential witnesses were dead. It's very convenient to do it that way. Even more so in ancient times, when record keeping was sketchier, and people still believed stories simply because someone told them. If you wrote that a man was raised from the dead, and at the same time scores of dead people hopped out of their graves and wandered around Jerusalem, you could get people to believe it. There were no witnesses to refute the claim. People didn't really understand that much about biology. The Egyptians, whose medical knowledge was roughly on a par with that of ancient Judea, used to remove the brain during mummification, presuming that even though the dead soul needed the body, the brain wasn't that important. It simply hadn't occurred to them that the entire personality exists only in the brain. They were more concerned with the heart.
Religious end-time predictions are always parochial. The Rapture is strictly a Christian idea, and mostly confined to fundamentalist and evangelical groups. Jews aren't even sure there is an afterlife, though they tend to be hopeful. Others figure the spirit just keeps getting recycled, as if it's a battery pack that's moved from saw to drill to sander as needed, but really doesn't have a particular identity it carries from one life to the next. Atheists generally tend to figure that once you're dead, you're simply dead, and since there's no consciousness without a functioning brain, you won't be bothered by it because there won't be a sentient "you" to be bothered.
The reliability of any end-of-the-world prediction, then, rests on its origin. If it's religious, it can be discounted. If a religion says that human life on this planet will one day end, that's accurate enough. At some point, it will. Either we'll kill ourselves, something will kill us, or we'll evolve into something that wouldn't be considered human today. But it won't be because some imaginary deity has decided to kill some of us and grant eternal life in Paradise to others.
And it's extremely unlikely that it will be predictable based on an ancient book.
Comments