Damn, it seems like over the past 48 hours that the prophecy mills have really gone into over-drive. I’m hard-pressed to even keep up with it all. Every half hour or so I come across somebody else with a new twist on the whole Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI / St. Malachy / Papal Prophecies. Either they email it to me directly, or I see it posted on the comments in my articles, or on other sites. Looks like every little prophetic bugger out there is coming out of the woodwork right now and going totally apeshit.
Do I blame them? Hell, no! I actually kind of enjoy the festivities myself, and I’ve obviously joined in the fun pretty publicly here. I do think though, as we all kick into a higher gear prophetically, that there are a few really damned useful things that we could all consider. One is the point I made in my previous post about how if you’re gonna call yourself a Christian, first off the Bible speaks out against divination, or prediction of future events. Prophecy is something a little different:
In the historical tradition of Christianity and Judaism, prophets were seen as social commentators. They revealed God’s will by reframing current events in the context of a fanciful story. By doing this, people can get mentally and emotionally “unstuck†from their problems, and see them in a slightly more objective way.
Next, is the most popular prophecies almost always predict complete and utter disaster. This means, that in order to motivate people to get up off their asses and make a change, you’ve got to sometimes scare the bejeezus out of them with a crazy story about all the horrible shit that’s gonna happen to them. People use this trick on kids all the time especially: “If you don’t brush your teeth, they’ll fall out,” or “If you don’t go to college, you won’t get a good job,” or “If you don’t surrender your civil liberties, then the terrorists will win.”
The trick to using fantastical stories like this is that the human brain neurologically has a difficult time telling the difference between actual experience, perceived experience, and imagined experience. They are called mirror neurons and they light up (to varying degrees) whether something happens to us in our bodies, or only in our minds - or even if we watch it happen to somebody else.
So no wonder people get all mixed up and whacked out from prophectic stories. Especially since these stories are told in the archetypal language of the unconscious mind. It’s a symbolic style of knowledge that most of us have very little experience with today, especially since it’s being sucked out of religion thanks to Fundamentalists and other jack-booted Literalists. As a result, the second non-rational knowledge floats up to the surface in our culture, nobody knows how to relate to it. Everybody freaks out, and assumes it must be literally true, rather than something which transcends mere facts and moves into the realm of psycho-spiritual events.
This problem is especially apparent in the Apocalypse / Armageddon field of speculation. People end up insisting it’s a hard cold fact, rather than a warm wet psychological one:
I think it’s also especially important to look at it as a genre of protest literature. In that sense, maybe it’s even sort of similar to a lot of the counter-cultural protest music that came out in the 60’s & 70’s with the Vietnam War and other shit. What that music did, and what fantasies of the Apocalypse do is turn power relationships upside-down, but in a fictionalized safe setting. Those who are downtrodden and oppressed can imagine the evil rulers and the unrighteous being struck down by the hand of God. And God will then lift his chosen people up to his bosom - quite literally and bodily in the case of those fundamentalist Christians who believe in the Rapture.
[...] Apocalypses let people mentally act out their fantasies of revolution and retribution. Their enemies are punished and those on the path of good find out that their actions and value systems will be vindicated at some point in the future.
The problem, of course, is the harder you make yourself believe in the story, the harder your mirror neurons work, and you eventually feel like it’s real and it’s really happening. Then, you end up in the sticky situation where you’re living a story instead of living your life. You’re so convinced that God’s gonna smite your enemies that you become too lazy to go out of the house and actually make a change for the better. Go out, talk to your enemies, see that they’re real people. Turn the other cheek. Love them even. Or, instead of hoarding food in your basement and saying Rosaries, waiting for the Beast to rise up, you could go outside and plant a tree. Talk to your neighbors. Say hello to strangers. Teach kids about awesome things. Do something to actively take part in the real world, the good world that we have right now all around us.
In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, line 113, we have this awesome passage:
His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?â€
“It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.â€
This is of course paralleled in the more canonical Luke 17:20-22 where Jesus tells the Pharisees, “The coming of the kingdom of God cannot be observed,” and “behold, the kingdom of God is among you.” Jesus didn’t want you to sit around with your thumb up your ass waiting for shit to squirt out. He wanted you to go out there, live it up and party like it’s 9999 AD. The Kingdom’s all around you. You don’t need to wait for it.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Gloria Olivae: Coming Soon to a Pope Near You!
- Online Gnosticism Officially Dead?
- tour obesity jesus internet prophecy mysticism
- Raymond Aguilera’s Prophecy.org
- Heat Death
2 Comments
I don’t know whether this is prophecy or prediction, but here goes:
I believe we are in the midst of the third great schism in Christendom. (Fourth, if you count the Followers of the Way getting kicked out of the synagogues.) There was the break between the Eastern church and Rome shortly before the end of the first millenium. Then there was the Protestant Reformation.
This schism is the presently widening gap between fundamentalists / born-againers / Christian Reconstructionists / Dominionists — and the “traditional” Catholics — on the one side, and the “liberal” / Christian Alumni / “relativists” on the other.
The election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI is a major step toward completing the break.
At the time of the first schism, the Eastern Orthodox folk didn’t have a name. That came later. So, too, the Protestants; that name came later, too. And today, we on the progressive side don’t have a name, but it will emerge in time.
What is most interesting to me is that the present schism crosses lines drawn during the second schism. It may also be happening within Eastern Orthodoxy, but I don’t know what is going on there. This split is within Christendom, not within a slice of the pie.
What is most worrysome for me is that the first two great schisms led quickly to cosiderable bloodshed: the Crusades following the first great schism; the Hundred Years’ War following the Reformation. We see the religious right in our country breathing threats and imprecations against “activist judges” and shrieking “attacks by Democrats on People of Faith.” Dominionists advocate execution of homosexuals, abortion doctors and “unchaste” women — but not “unchaste” men — so the ratcheting-up toward violence has already begun. And what has appeared recently in the blogs concerning religious harassment at the Air Force Academy points up how close the religious right is to controlling the military.
Those of us who try to live our lives by the Beatitudes will bear the brunt of the violence. Perhaps we will witness the triumph of nonvolent protest, but my prophecy / prediction is that a lot of faithful people on both sides will die before this schism settles down to “the way things are.”
this may blow your mind, but i’ll see that same schism and raise you. this isnt just happening in christendom, its happening in all of western culture. on the one side stands monolithic institutions based on story-systems of control and mediating experience for others. on the other you have people who are on the sidelines, marginalized, fighting for the values of personal responsibility, authority, knowledge, freedom and direct experience.
these people cross lines of denomination and culture. i wrote about them/us in a recent post in more detail. they take many names: occultists, pagans, conspiracy theorists, hackers, open source movement, the emerging church movement, anarchists. they all advocate a free and open culture devoid of centralized control systems- whether those systems are the catholic church, american fundamentalists, hollywood, media, intellectual property law, washington, or what have you. its all there and its only going to become more pronounced
2 Trackbacks
[...] tuality21 Apr 2005 10:06 am
Prophecy Does Not Equal Divination Redux
On the heels of Tim’s current posts about prophecy, I wanted to repost portion [...]
[...] te present circumstances to their ultimate conclusions. In a sense, it functions just like prophecy did in days of yore (and still does, sometimes). It shows p [...]