I Explain What I Told Ya

I did a post a few days ago titled Told Ya!
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/03/told-ya.html
and it was ostensibly about the economy as I saw it in 2013. The post ended by saying that the nonsense worked by the Republicans (meaning lack of financial oversight and the Iraq War... I suppose I should have included the Democrats, too) would come to a horrible fruition in 2016; Yep, 2016 was when the bottom would drop out.

Of course, the economic bottom did not drop out. It was an election year and we had a different outcome, one I referred to early on in 2016 as the abomination of desolation (standing in the holy place, etc.)

I wanted to clarify that the post Told Ya! was about economics, but the reprint a few days ago was about what actually became clear in 2016: not economic catastrophe but the unveiling of our spiritual and moral catastrophes.

Thirty-five years ago, I worked with a guy who had bought into the religion of Armageddon and End-of-Times-Around-the-Corner. He studied the Book of Revelations, carried a small copy with him, and spoke of the coming wrath.
As it turned out, within five years his wife became ill, she then had an incapacitating stroke (at a quite young age!) leaving him to raise the three children, work a full-time job, and to take care of her.

After some years of this, she recovered a good amount, at which time she divorced him and went off with someone else.

So this guy's prophecy was correct in that there was catastrophe in the near future; he just got the details a little wrong, for it was his own personal disaster and it was his own family, not the world.

And this happens an awful lot if you take the time to notice. The intuition of disaster very often takes on religious iconography and we think our own intimations of bane are general to the world.
This is why I like good stories. All the stories of plagues and zombies and future horrors frighten me with their cumulative intuitive burden. Let me see the good stories! Let me see a crowd of stories that redeem us!

We are at the edge of chaos.
--

Told Ya!

Cassandra, the Prophetess whom no one Believed

While looking for my photos of my date with Katerina Witt, the Olympic ice skater, in the New York Public Library (no details, please!) I came across the following post, which I re-print without editing.
All the emphases were there in the original.
I was spot on, but missed the fine, fine details, and we know who is in the details.

I thought it was Economics 101, but it was Introduction to Politics in the Trump Era, who was not on my presidential radar in 2013.

The following re-print is reproduced exactly as it appeared in 2013.

Published  October 14, 2013
------------------------------------------------------------

My Goofy Economics

My Favorite Economist, Katerina Wittgenstein

If you have ever read my posts about my "intuitive" view of this economic structure, I had been aware of a reverse Fibonacci series of economic disasters... or mini-disasters.

A Fibonacci series is  {1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34..., } where the nth term = (n-1)th term + (n-2)th term.

A reverse Fibonacci just flips it:  { ...., 34, 21, 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1}

If all is clear - and it should be, for we are at the very end of this series and we need only pay attention to  8, 5, 3, 2, 1 - we come to the present day.

I maintained that the Great Recession of 2008 was part of the series, and the previous part was the Dot Com Meltdown in the time period 1999-2001.

So, 2000 (average) + 8 (Fibinacci term) = 2008, which indeed was the year of the next disaster, the Great Recession.

Over the last few years, I had lost a great deal of confidence in this "intuition" of mine, because the timing seemed out of whack.

However, today I look and I see a looming USA default.

2008 + 5 = 2013 !!

or, the year of the Great Recession plus the next term in the Fibonacci series is year 2008 + 5 = year 2013
The years we are dealing with are:    2000, 2008, 2013, 2016, 2018, 2019
(the bold print years are past, the underlined is now, and the rest are in the future.)

The only good thing one could say about my goofy economics is that is has worked so far.
Personally, I feel 2016 will be........... the interesting year. I won't go into details, other than 2016 will be the culminating year when the Republican-created crises of 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 itself will come to fruition

That is why I wish to create a sanctuary. Can you blame me?
I have had this type of premonition for an extremely long time, and I would rather be thought goofy and daft than be proven correct, but I am merely a messenger, and not a very good one.


--
Note

I take back that bit in the last sentence, " I am merely a messenger".
I am myself and speak for only myself.

------------------------------------------------------------




03/20/2017
I wuz gonna title it "prophecy", but "told ya!: - or "I'm tellin' ya!" - mean the same thing and are not so annoying.

Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven

 Sarah and Maybelle Carter Singing "Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven."

We wrote a post on Mr. Bannon a couple of days ago   (http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-grey-mech-cometh.html) based on an article in The Huffington Post titled  Steve Bannon's obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome

We only wish to point out the perils of prophecy and believing that one may know the future with certainty.

Point 1.
That is why we have elections, like the most recent one. If outcomes were deterministic, elections are mere window-dressing.


Point 2
We cannot talk with God.
Oh, we know we always pray and say we are talking to God, but we also say that God is "ineffable", meaning we can't talk about God, for he is so beyond our understanding.

However, when we say we cannot talk about something, we also imply that we cannot talk to that something, for if we could talk to God, then we could grasp at least those human linguistics phenomena which God must use, and then we could have some understanding of divinity in an intimate form.

Now if you say that God is not ineffable and the argument above is nonsense, fine. But that also means that God can be talked about like the Super Bowl and mustard on pretzels.
A lot of us do just that.

I do not talk to God. When I do that old-timey prayer thing, I am talking to myself and my Icon or Image of God, but I have not in any sense used a holy telephone and said, "Hello, Central, give me heaven."
Prayer now is different.

The realization that one cannot talk to God is devastating and unsettling.
It is a vast opening within our existence.
That is why if we really understand the inability to talk to God, we should have something ready as a lifeline... else we are left in a sea of despair ("despair" since we have lived our entire lives thinking we can palaver with God, and that removal of that underpinning shatters the structure of the ego).


What happens after this realization is surprising and the topic of some later article.


Now, we see Mr. Bannon thinking he can speak to God, or he can channel History, or practice some other arcane science.
Mr. Bannon, like so many of us, has drained the world of the color of God, and left us with black-and-white. Like Marx, he has kicked God off the throne and has enthroned an ideology. Nothing is in the hands of God - for we cannot speak to God, so it may as well be as if God does not exist!!!! - and the world is derelict of divinity... the world is populated by the walking dead, who do not yet know they are dead.
Others of us have enthroned our own nation, making American Exceptionalism our golden calf, or have dreamed up Imperiums based upon ourselves and allies and canons of the past which we hardly half understand.... all to try and fill back in the blanks we have left in our worlding.

After draining away the colors of the world, many people try to "colorize" what is left with their theories of the future.

The roads to the future are too many and the progress too uncertain to be able to predict.
Mr. Bannon is merely seeing patterns in falling sands and anticipating the edges of chaos.

As a child I saw facial patterns in the wood of the furniture and doors of my parents' house. After having discerned the pattern, I saw the same faces every day in the grain and knots.
That did not make those patterns real faces.

There is no short, sweet, and easy road to prophecy. Ask Cassandra. Ask the prophet in his own hometown.


*****

As I recall the words:

"Hello, Central, give me heaven,
for my mother's there;
you will find her with Saint Peter
on the Golden Stair..."

--

The Grey Mech Cometh

This morning I woke about 4:30, got up made coffee, thought of somethings I had to do, then sat down to watch the rest of Terminator: Genysis. I do not quite understand the continuous softening of Sarah Connor in the series of movies, but it was OK.

I mean, the whole time-travel-paradox thing with an evil John Connor lost me at the first turn in the time maze and I really did not understand a word of the patter the characters spoke about "future so-and-so" and "in the past so-and-so"... so much was my befuddlement that Skynet himself became more like a pantomime horse in the sky...

zipping through various incarnations, or immetallations, or implasmations of newer and more advanced terminator entities.
So I did not seek to understand.

Furthermmore, there was a sub-plot of Sarah and John's father-to-be and romance, but any romance was always preceded by (1) strategy sessions, or (2) tactical discussions, or (3) meditations on time-travel paradoxes of Skynet and related devices.

I liked it. I do not sit through films I don't like. I like Terminator films. Period.
Yesterday I watched The Queen of Katwe, and I liked that, too, and I always like Mira Nair's films.


After finishing with Terminator: Genysis, I took in a few blinks-worth of Suicide Squad - I figure I'll watch about 15 minutes per day to keep the evil from boiling over - and then I went to the good old computer, thinking I would be greeted with a few laughs about the new administration.

Fate, had something else in mind.


Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable
Trump’s top adviser thinks we’re in “the great Fourth Turning in American history.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-apocalypse_us_5898f02ee4b040613138a951?ref=yfp

... In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now...

... Strauss and Howe’s theory [which theory is the view held by Mr. Bannon] is based on a series of generational archetypes — the Artists, the Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes — that sound like they were pulled from a dystopian young adult fiction series. Each complete four-part cycle, or saeculum, takes about 80 to 100 years, in Strauss and Howe’s reckoning. The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, focuses on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle.

Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event — perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis...

I was not entirely honest with you about this morning.
Before I had gotten out of bed, I was thinking of fears and flight; I was thinking of the things that haunt my mind and bedevil me; I was thinking of the strange imaginings that sometimes sap my strength in the marches of the night...
Then I got up made coffee, thought of somethings I had to do, then sat down to watch the rest of Terminator: Genysis. I do not quite understand the continuous softening of Sarah Connor in the series of movies, but it was OK...

I have mentioned I often was oppressed by a vision of a future dystopic. This was back in the 80s and before, well before most of the modern day bleak future visions, but not before Brave New World, 1984, and A Chronicle for Leibowitz.

I knew such things were madness, because I lived in the USA, powerful, wealthy, religious.
And since the turn of the century, I saw 9/11, the 2008 Financial Crisis during which you could see how nervous the President and the Treasury Secretary were on TV, and I have now seen the abomination of desolation in the holy place....

I hope to God the Bannon article is nonsense, for the idolatry of one's own mind in pretending to know the infinite mind of God is spiritual death.


--

The Grey Mech is a character is Gregory Benford's Sailing Bright Eternity (1995), a mechanical device of ultra-potent destructiveness.
Why grey? Why is Strauss and Howe's champion grey?
What about Mr. Grey in Stephen King's Dreamcatcher?

"Young man, why are you here? You know we have an appointment in Samarra t'morra!"

----

Blood Moons Come In Fours

 Pentad of Raccoons

I was unaware until yesterday that the biblical scholar, John Hagee, has propounded a theory of coming catastrophe based upon 4 lunar eclipses during the period October 2014 through October 2015.
How could I have missed it? Perhaps the press of living a life made me miss this unusual bit of Pastor Hagee bowing down before the idol of his own mind. That is very possible. We live in a time of Celebrity, which - when you come right down to it - is not much more that an idolatry of the Unprepared and the Ignorant and the Inept.

In order to strike the right tone, Hagee calls the set of 4 lunar eclipses a "tetrad".
"Tetrad" means "a set of 4 items" in Greek, no more and no less; just "4 any-old-things-and whatnots" makes a tetrad... all being rather like 5 things makes for a lovely "pentad".

The use of the Greek "tetrad", however, takes us out of the everyday, and takes us back to the work of the Septuagint, when the Hebrew bible was translated into common Greek of the era of the second century B.C.E.
Tetrad has the aura of sort of a supernatural kind. It also reminds of of Hermetic philosophy and prophecies, and I am sure Nostradamus used "tetrad" in place of   "quater chosz"  [ =  quatre choses = 4 things].
When it comes to modern day biblical mumbo-jumbo, Ancient Greek terminology is the best thing since sliced bread  ("artos kommenos"). It simply reeks of authenticity.

One thing I have noticed is that lunar eclipses are not really the color of blood. The color is more like a smudged burnished-bright copper. I remember sitting out until midnight once to view such an eclipse, and being startled by a raccoon family of five  ( a "pentad"!) go walking by on the top of the backyard fence...
This has led to an unfortunate tendency to conflate lunar eclipses and visions of animals and their babies, which is more like a cozy, huggy, cutsey-ootsey view of the "blood moon" business, and not quite catastrophically oriented to suit the likes of Mr. Hagee.

In Matthew 24 there is:

…42"Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming. 43"But be sure of this, that if the head of the house had known at what time of the night the thief was coming, he would have been on the alert and would not have allowed his house to be broken into. 44"For this reason you also must be ready; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not think He will.…

Not much of a thief if he were to send ahead a note saying that he would break in on-or-about the time of the fourth lunar eclipse/blood moon... etc., etc., etc., sincerely,  The Burglar

Beyond the obvious fact that one should be prepared are other problems inherent in "knowing when the thief in the night" will strike:
(1) we may feel we do not have enough time remaining to become pure enough, and thus we may despair, or
(2) we may do unusual things in a state of manic exhiliration, things which may be totally out of character due to our state of euphoria and being-out-of-our-everyday-minds.

The list of the possible follies of humanity on the verge of Greatness is probably without limit. We would collapse into some bipolar boiling panic, sort of a fast-motion "out of the fire, into the frying pan" mania of belief and doubt, hope and despair, over and over again until we exhaust our selves and souls.


Now as far as war and catastrophes in October, 2015, any sane man or woman pretty much expects them then and more of the same through 2017, blood moons or not.
It is just a continuation of our mad tango of crime and karma.

--

The Rosetta Probe: Oh, Alexandria!

 Rashid (Rosetta) on the Nile

Having written about the European Space Agency Rosetta probe the other day, I recalled something.

In 1879, Sir Richard Burton wrote in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madina and Meccah:

Alexandria, moreover, is an interesting place to Moslems, on account of the prophecy that it will succeed to the honours of Meccah, when the holy city falls into the hands of the indidel. In its turn, Alexandria will be followed by Kairawan (in the Regency of Tunis); and this by Rashid or Rosetta, which last shall endure to the end of time.

--

Blown Up All Out Of Proportion

I went on record as saying that if the USA went to war in Syria, it would be a very bad thing. In fact, a very, very, very bad thing. I intimated that it would be an important step in the advent of the "four horsemen" of Karma and retribution, and all of this sort of crashed in on me when I happened to see AP photos of the so-called Syrian Free Army, and some of which obviously were mercenaries, who were not even Muslim, or observant Muslim, mercenaries at that.

It was like seeing the Abomination of Desolation standing in the holy place.

Well, that was surely an overblown bit of oratory, right?

Looking back, I did not like doing it, because such feelings and intuitions I tend to keep private, and I do not like exposing so much of myself.

However, look at what it took to divert the dogs of war!

We have witnessed what for all the world reminds me of a Frank Capra film on politics and war, where a bright-eyed, idealistic hero propounds a heroically improbable and honest and simple way to make things better, while all the older and wiser and more powerful smile and shake their heads...

... and he pulls it off! Thanks to the miracle of cinema and Frank Capra!

It's like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, but in a Purple Rose Of Cairo theater, where James Stewart has stepped down off the silver screen. He is followed by Claude Rains as Sen. Lindsay Graham and Edward Arnold as Sen. John McCain. William Demarest comes next as General Martin Dempsey, who had sent a letter to Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee describing military intervention in Syria "a fool's errand". (For which opinion - in real life, not film - the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was termed "disingenuous" by Sen. McCain.)

Senators McCain and Graham

When it takes an almost miracle to change things, I do not think the original warning was overblown bombast; not a bit.
I think I was right.
Thank God for the President and the spirit of Frank Capra and Mr. Smith...

--

Prescience and Prophecy

Prophecy is not a statement of future facts, whereas Prescience is.

There are a lot of people who go around saying bad things are going to happen rather soon, and it is all due to whatever behavior they disapprove of. Donald Trump says that everyone will lose their money, NewsMax habitually has disaster in their view, morals are declining and the day of reckoning is at hand...

Well, since we are all prone to death and decay, some day of reckoning is always at hand.
To be precise, bad things are always happening, so it takes no particular brains to be on the gloomy side.

It is a trivial statement to prophesy doom.
Many of the Prophets themselves got it a bit wrong, and things did not work out according to their exact words.

Prescience is a different matter. It depends upon Intuition, and that depends upon losing the predispositions inherent in the structure of the overweening Ego.

--

Forecasting and Prophecy 2

Consequent to: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/04/forecasting-and-prophecy.html
{Once more: notes to myself. Difficult to read and lacking in a clear plan and logic}


The answer to my question is probably just: one cannot assign an exact time to something which has not happened yet. OK. I agree with that. The future is probabilistic.

It turns out that dates in the past are not as clear as we think they are, either. The exact date of the invention of the wheel comes to mind: it is very imprecise.

Exact dating seems to be a function of temporal data - or time-and-date-stamp data - that is available. Lacking a sufficient amount of time-and-date-stamp data to muck around with, there are no exact assignment of dates.
This obviously poses a problem for the future: how can we assign an exact time to a future event, if we still need some time-and-date-stamp data, which time-and-date-stamp data itself will not be available until some time in the future!??
This increases the burden on prophets and forecasters enormously, if they wish to utter oracular statements with times in them. They need to go to the well of inspiration not just once for some astonishing event, they need to make numerous journeys for time/date information as well.
(How fortuitous the Mayan Calendar end of the world business is: it combines both the future event, the imminent end of everything, as well as a precise calendar date!  Couldn't be nicer.)

I do not think times and dates are all that important about the future state of affairs... unless you are planning a vacation, that is. Read any opinion columns on economics: the range is astounding; there is no general consensus and all the best and brightest do not agree. And no one can tell exactly when some outcome will ocur.
Precision in things as time and dates and exact details is akin to Schrodinger's cat: the proof of exact detail is in the execution of the detailed act. Even prophecies cannot be assigned a truth-value of "True" until they come to pass. We are in the habit of looking at various religious prophecies and thinking of them as being "true" from their intial utterance all the way up to their fulfillment. We look on these things from a privileged perspective of the Monday Morning Quarterback after the game is over, and we tend to take this same perspective and apply it to prophecies about the future yet to come.

Faith and God do not depend on truth-values... even upon the truth-value of the Psalms.
(The time of existence of a prophecy from its utterance until its fulfillment consists of a self-correcting feedback Mishnah-like process by which believers smooth off rough edges, and unbelievers comb-face into roughness.)
It strikes me, then, for example, that the common procedure of trying to instill Faith by demonstrating how many prophecies from the Old Testament forecast the events of the New Testament is a very dubious propaedeutic, which is used to instill a second-hand sense of awe and leads the student to the mistake of thinking that we may delineate the Holy by some sort of emotional feeling.
This is pretty common: one sees people speaking about God as if Awe defines the experience, or Joy at a summer's day defines it, or some Magnificent Dish of Vengeance Served Cold defines it... nothing but the normal attempt to take the profound and make it domestic and "down home".
--

Forecasting and Prophecy

(notebook: this is more like a note for myself; it is not necessarily a logical exposition)

I was looking at weather anomalies, such as March 2012, and wondering about the frequency of anomalies, how the criteria for evaluating anomalies change as frequency changes, and some other statistical stuff.

So then I was letting my mind wander, and I ended up at Edgar Cayce's, noticing that he did not usually assign definite dates to most of his prophecies or forecasts, but merely said they were in the future. He spoke of such things as the Atlantic coastline being altered, and I wondered if he meant by rising ocean levels. He said a number of such changes would occur within a generation, but failed to supply a definite time frame.

So then I thought of the difference between Edgar Cayce and Harold Camping, who assigned at least 2 definite dates for the end of the world in 2011: it is obvious that being exact as to the time axis is a bit foolhardy for a prophecy. Now why is that? What is there about a future statement that makes nonsense out of the exact date? What is the difference in the temporal logic of a future statement - or prophecy - and that of a present statement or a past statement?

A prophecy or correct forecast is a great leap of intuition: it comes into being majestically naked as Botticelli's Venus and it is too brilliant to look at. We rush to clothe Venus like Botticelli's North Wind, bringing draperies of our established knowledge to render her less overwhelming.
Dying gods of agriculture - corn gods, cereal goddesses - uncovered the secrets of their cultivation and preparation in dreams and visions of intuition to our ancestors. Innovation over the lifetime of humanity is a mixture of science, experiment, and the visionary.
Visions can remain sacred, or they may become mundane: ancient peoples may have sacrificed a human surrogate for the corn god as well as carrying out their daily drudgery of grinding corn where ritual has become routine.

Prophecy must remain unmixed with reality until everything comes to fruition; otherwise, we see Harold Camping taking potshots with a scattergun at the end of times. In other words, there is no science of future statements until they instantiate into present statements. Then in memory, we may torture them with our logic and make good science of them.
However!.... and this is a big "however"... in the time between the prophecy's utterance and its fulfillment, things may have changed so substantially that those old forecasts are rather without value, except for those antiquarians who need them to support their belief systems.
--

Prophecy

Prophecies, once they are written down, are dramas.

Prophecy is Play.
It is not a serious and planned out attempt at the future.
It is play, like Jacob's wrestling with an angel...
if you are familiar, it is Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo in The Seven Samurai.

Then there is the intuition of prophecy, and there is the physical act of prophesying.

Women prophesy as well as men.
When St. Paul cautions that women be silent in meetings, or that their heads be covered, he is speaking of a modesty in the physical act of prophesy. (The act of prophesying transcends our social mores, and that is why it is little seen in mainstream religions these days.) There is a wide range of opinion on this, which fortunately comes to a conclusion in my small mind as "... there are not male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus."
--

A Process of Dreidels

We tend to forget about process and think more of individual events. This is why some of us think the world will end sometime in December 2012: the reason is the Mayan calendar, but more importantly we have been able to fix upon a definite point in time, and it is the definite point in time which is all important.

We do not like to think of events as "processes" extending back and forward in time: the end of the world is 2:15 AM on such-and-such a date. We think we shall tip over the edge; we do not think we are already sliding down it slowly bit by bit. Oh, we may say we are, but everyone believes there is a point of no return, a point when the sands of time begin to avalanche.

Our images of unhappy futures wherein we seek uncertain sanctuary from zombies and vampires and evil men is not a prediction of a date that suddenly appears in the future; it is a commentary on the "now" and the ongoing process of a life declining into despair.
Siegfried Kracauer's history of the German cinema "From Caligari To Hitler" does not indicate that films "foretold" the future. No, but they were a process in the making of the future: they were creating and fighting against an infinite number of futures.
Look at Lang's "Metropolis": for all its length and story, it did not capture the story of what was to come; it was no prophet in that sense, but it did thoroughly plumb the two obvious alternatives: Capital and Labor work together versus Capital and Labor fight each other.
It is the depth of this film which taken as part of the process of German History from 1918 to 1945  makes a enormous emphatic irony of the reality: both Capital and Labor were to be enslaved and subverted into Madness... and that was a possibility that escaped Lang, but may not have escaped the inhabitants of Caligari's insane asylum.
Lang was not aware of it, but it was right before his unbelieving eyes disguised in such a way that its toxicity did not have enough "Symbolic Gravity " to capture his awareness and make it a satellite to its heavy gravitas of enchantment!
(Ever since, we have never stopped jabbering about National Socialism; it is still our favorite perjorative. It is such a favorite curse word that it is symbolically a "black hole" to some minds.)

The Apocalypse is now, not some future time. It is always now for us. A belief system which puts things like the Apocalypse into the future is a child's toy: a dreidel spinning as we wait for it to slow and topple over: a great miracle will be happening ... there!

If we need to fix things, the fix is now. The disaster is now, the fix is now, the future is now.

Forget prophecy. Prophecy is part of an ongoing process, and points not to some future time and event, but points to now and points to itself as well as everything else around it.
--
postscript

What is the place of Mankind in the Universe?
Man's place is the Now. Man has the unique ability to forget the immense past and the infinite future and stand naked in the Now, as if the present were the most important thing in creation.

The infinity of the Holy means it cannot stand in the Now. Only Mankind sees things in the blink of an eye and encapsulate reality into the tiny ambit of its mind. The angels envy us our ability to love in the present; they can only love as a process. There is no climactic moment in infinite love.

The genius of Christianity is in the Holy stepping into the Now.
Every other religion allows the Holy into the world, too, but too often they portray it as Mankind doing the will of God, whereas what we are talking about is Mankind meeting God and somehow both existing in the Now alongside the Infinite.

Paradox.
--

Islamic Finance

In 20 years, the same people who fear the spectre of Shari'a law will welcome the spirit of Islamic finance. Of course, it will have a different name, but it will be essentially the same. It will heal the wound of our financial cancers.
--

Joey the Prophet

I have told this story before. I will repeat it because of its importance.

I worked with Joey for years. He became interested in a certain Bible reading group, and began to see signs of the End of Times everywhere in the Politics, the Weather, The Seismology, the Philosophies, the Sexual Mores around him. (Keep in mind this was 30 years ago or more!)
Joey was convinced that the End of Times was coming soon. He would refer to it in his conversation, even though his own behavior did not seem to be going under any "major overhaul": he still smoked, he drank alcohol, and he was an avid reader of skin magazines.

After about three years, things came to a climax: his wife had a serious stroke at a young age, leaving him to take care of her as well as their three kids. His life was in turmoil. After she recovered and had undergone rehabilitation, she divorced him, leaving him with custody.

Joey was right. He was focused and knew that "something evil this way comes", but like so many of us, he neglected the details. He focused too easily and too early on a script of radical change and upheaval that was quite wrong for him.

We all of us intuit the future.

Most of us leap too quickly into a set description and scenario of it, using ready-to-hand literary and religious tracts that do the heavy work of making the Intuition intelligible in language and imagery.

You have to do the work yourself.
That means that if the intuition is fearsome, you have to learn to cope with it, and not go running off to some totally inappropriate scenario of someone else's End of Times Follies. And this may be the most important reason to control Fear: to allow ourselves to write our own futures - whether they are filled with joy or suffering - we have to do it ourselves. That is the teaching of all our religious geniuses.
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Perils of Prophecy 2

Spare me! Someone said that all states are not possible once God has chosen what is going to happen. In essence, God has determined the outcomes already, the probability functions have collapsed, and the Rapture is on the 6:35 milk train from Jersey.

Well, well, well.
OK. If God "chooses" and determines the future, He thereby excludes a great number of possible futures. Therefore, His knowledge does not comprehend the possibility of these states being real outcomes in the real world. Therefore, they are - in a sense - closed to Him.
Therefore, God is not all-knowing.

In short, Deterministic Scenarios, the Rapture being one such, deny the Omniscience of God.
Omniscience implies a Complex and Probabilistic Future... and Free Will.

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note:

It has been suggested that God "knows" about the possible futures He has decided against.

That is a nonce use of the word "know".

It is as if I were using epistemology in a comedy routine.

In essence, the idea that God knows futures He has decided against is tantamount to saying that He is "

"a twiddler, a dreamer, a silly heart,... a jabberbox..."

(quote: Uncle Buck)

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The Perils of Prophecy

The Sibyll of Delphi - Prophetess

I was quite wrong about the effect of the S&P downgrade. Idiotically wrong, to be precise. Such is life.

However, the wrongness there lead me to look at the other "expectation" that I have, which is that 2013 will be a problem year.
Now for I long time I have wondered why this is rolling around in my head. There is the fact that it is five years after 2008's meltdown, and since 2008 is about eight years following the previous big market downslide... and a few other things thrown into the blender and pureed... I was looking at a reverse Fibonacci series of discomfort. (A Fibonacci series starts with 1,2 and adds the previous two integers to compute the following integer: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,...)
I was looking at intervals   13, 8, 5, the last being 2013.
Neat, but naughty, naughty in the sense that it makes little or no sense, and the fact that there is a reverse Fib series does not mean a thing.
But, given its illusion of mathematical rigor and logic, it is a perfect delusion to obsess about. I could OCD it, just like the Reverend Harold Camping - and so many others through history - had obsessed about the end of times, and ended up calling the game over when it had not even gotten to the seventh inning stretch.

One thing the Reverend Camping did not see is:
(1) if God is all-knowing, God must be able to comprehend the details of the universe, and
(2) this means God must be able to comprehend all the possible outcomes and time-lines, and
(3) by comprehending all time-lines and outcomes, that means God comprehends a certain future state, call it S1, as well as another future state, not-S1, this state of not-S1 being the state where S1 did not come to pass.
(4) Since all states are within God's comprehension, none has a favored status; that is, S1 is not somehow more necessarily going to happen than not-S1.

Therefore, everything is possible. Everything existing thing has free will to wander through the infinite set of possibilities.

In other words, we can aways change the future.
If we could not change the future, Jesus should have known it, reckoned that things weren't worth dieing over, and settled down to his life as a carpenter.
Similarly, the Lord Buddha would have remained in his palace, and Moses would have remained in Egypt, and the Prophet of Islam would have remained a successful merchant.
Joseph Smith might have gone to work the farm with his uncle in Detroit, and then stayed there.

But they did not!
They know the future can be changed.

So must we. There is no burden upon us so great that we must allow the weight of its oppression to keep us from our task.

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