Alright, so I sort of touched on this subject before, but I feel I need to revisit it for no reason. Also, because I can do whatever I damn well please.

Now, as you are no doubt aware, there is quite a furor about “the end of the world”… well, more precisely, there was. as 2012 approaches it appears that they are changing their tune “well, it won’t be the end, but everything will change!”.

For “facts” proponents refer to the mayans, Nostradamus, and the bible.

for Facts.

please, tell me they aren’t serious?

First, they claim that the Mayans “knew” there was going to be a major change in our history. How? magic? Did a people who couldn’t even master the length of the solar year actually have somehow mastered time travel and seeing into the future? No. Of course not. Sure, their civilization was advanced, but if they couldn’t predict their civilizations own death I really don’t think it’s very smart to believe any of their “predictions” (did anybody account for the fact that their solar calendar was busted, anyway?).

And don’t get me started on Nostradamus. Biggest phony ever. “hey, guys, I have an idea, I’ll write down completely meaningless gibberish and say it’s prophecy, and people will believe it and connect the dots for me.”

The sad thing is nobody sees it! They are purposely vague not because “he didn’t understand today’s technology or the various changes that he “saw”” but rather because if he was specific they would be wrong.

The fact that any otherwise reasonable human being with a solid understanding of either physics or the nature of space can even give any sort of creedence to an obvious fake and even go so far as to evangelize his name (well, if he predicted it, it’ll come true).

Except he didn’t predict anything! That’s the problem I have with it. If I wrote down that in 2013:

a great power will rise. Many will be killed.
The Koala bear roams free. eucalyptus suffers.
Olives drop. All dead. Great bird eats grapes for breakfast.

And enough people believed it “it would happen” not because I predicted it, but the very vague nature of the words opens them up to so many interpretations that during the course of the year it’s certain that there is a timeline that could fit this random gibberish. This doesn’t even touch on the fact that the man was french, so all of these predictions are translated. I decided to do a little digging, namely about his “power” to predict world events; for example, here is the original french passage that “predicted world war 2”:

Bêtes farouches de faim fleuves tranner;
Plus part du champ encore Hister sera,
En caige de fer le grand sera treisner,
Quand rien enfant de Germain observa. (II.24)

Now, according to the website I originally found this the translation of this to english was:

Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers,
The greater part of the battle will be against Hitler.
He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron,
When the son of Germany obeys no law.

Note how names and places are mentioned quite clearly. But this is a biassed translation- the translator restricted an otherwise vague quatrain to fit his own purposes. The literal translation is:

Beasts mad with hunger will swim across rivers,
Most of the army will be against the Lower Danube.
The great one shall be dragged in an iron cage
When the child brother will observe nothing.

As with any of his passages, and even his strongest proponents agree “his predictions only become crystal clear after they have occured”.

What the fuck kind of use is that? “Oh, he can predict the future, but we can only know what it means after it happens” So, basically, he purposely phrased his quatrains in a vague, completely meaningless way and as I said those who want to are able to give meaning to any passage. It’s really quite simple, and the fact that people actually believe this utter and complete bullshit is beyond me. Not to mention they even go so far as to invent propesized events- apparently he predicted 9/11, but he didn’t. the entire thing was a hoax. So the real question is how many of his “predictions” are either biassed translations or completely fabrications? I find it interesting because a large quantity of his “followers” can’t even read french.

This is a rather similar case as with the bible itself. Now, I have no problem with Christians of course, and the bible certainly contains words that anybody can live by.

But it’s a spiritual guidebook, not a prophetic gypsy book. The problem is the bloody thing has been translated and re-translated that even if the original was in some way “the word of god” it’s become so mangled and filtered by so many people translating it between different languages that it’s only natural for some parts to lose cohesion.

It, just like most “predictions” is also rather vague, using symbolic imagery to try to pain a picture of the future (in those parts people claim it does that).

Now, the problem here is that the only place that “symbolic imagery” and “predictions” should ever be used in the same sentence is when you are referring to the horoscopes in a newspaper. No reasonable person is going to read a horoscope for their sign that says:

There could be some friction in your place of work or group gathering today, and it will be up to you to take the middle ground. Pay attention to the minor details in connection with a major project, because it’s the little things that will make the final picture work.

and actually believe it (well, nobody who is completely sane, anyway) because it’s often wrong and it’s sufficiently vague it could apply to nearly anything. and if you add the fact that desperate times calls for creating new meanings for literal words… for example, a die-hard advocate, upon seeing that t his has absolutely no relevance to anything whatsoever might try to say “well, maybe the friction represents…” or “by “middle ground” they must mean…

it’s all a load of smoke and mirrors and it’s the fact that these people understand, either conciously or sub-consciously, how the human mind has an arcane, even magical, ability to fill in the blanks and create connections where there are none. It’s really no more then a optical illusion with ideas and words. When you see the classic optical illusion whereby two images of the same size are placed on a perspective plane, do you truly believe that the object that appears larger (because it is “farther back”) is really larger?

No, of course not. Once you remove the backdrop of the perspective line and vanishing point the entire thing is clearly not as it seems. So too can people cleverly insert “perspective lines” in our very own perceptions of words. Just as our Visual Cortex fills in many blanks for us when there isn’t enough information, or as part of our perceptions (for example, our perception of contrast, colour, and so forth, can be changed by merely introducing a few lines, just as the way an entire scene looks can be changed by introducing a single element. So too does our mind “fill in the blanks” for many other topics. More precisely, we see what isn’t there because we want to see what isn’t there.

Many people have capitalizee on this.

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