I remember that I was just a young pioneer witness when I first met Peter Stairs. I had knocked on his door one Sunday morning whilst accompanied by a sister, and Peter had come to the door looking like he had enjoyed a very heavy night.
He lived in a prefab at Lee-on-Solent and as he stood at the door glaring balefully at us, reeking of stale beer, body odour and cigarettes, I prepared myself to receive a verbal onslaught of weary abuse.
However, he just stood to one side and demanded that we enter his home. Cautiously, we did so, and he beckoned us to sit with him at a battered old table with his wife and children. Up to this point, he had no idea who we were, even, so I was ready to be ejected forceably once we stated our reasons for visiting.
However, Peter and family were intrigued by our message, they had never spoken to a JW before and loved the idea of a New World, living forever and playing with lions and tigers. We left after a couple of hours, and Peter said that he couldn’t wait to get to work at the dockyard next day, so that he tell his work mates all about the JW’s and the New World.
At this point I realised that Peter was going to hear some bad stuff about JW’s and probably wouldn’t let me back into his home, so I employed a little subterfuge. I twisted the prophesy about being “persecuted for my names sake” to suit Peters mentality.
“Peter”, I said, “This is a wonderful opportunity for you to prove to yourself that our religion is the right one. Jesus said that the true religion would be spoken about badly by non-believers, so when you go to work on Monday, if anyone says bad things about us, you will know that we are the true faith”.
Next Sunday I called back on Peter who came to the door with a beaming smile! “It’s true!” he chuckled, “Everyone says terrible things about JW’s, it must be the right religion, why some of the chaps at work told me that you let babies die for not allowing a blood transfusion! What a terrible lie that must be!”
OK, so my subterfuge backfired on me, Peter dropped his interest after he discovered that, whilst we were certainly getting verbal persecution, and thereby fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately the accusations were actually true, which somewhat deflated the Biblical prophecy into reality. I had tailored the prophecy to suit my own ends.
I have always felt that it’s easy to make prophecies, simply on an “It will, or it wont happen” basis. That’s a 50 – 50 shot straightaway. Then there is hindsight prophecy, the ability to look at a past event and match it to something written earlier. Even more ludicrous is the invisible fulfilment, the “It happened but you didn’t see it” fulfilment.
I found the following article on website that deals with prophecy, so I have pasted here to read. Although much of the article concerns Israel, which is a separate subject, the basic principles used here are still very valid, IMO.subject: http://soothfast.topcities.com/writ_prophecy.html
Biblical Prophecies Are Bunk
Self-fulfilling Prophecies
Right. If the Bible hadn't made such an almighty fuss about Israel in damn near every one of its pages, I doubt it would have occurred to anyone to resurrect it after the end of World War II. The Bible prophesied that Israel would be reborn someday, and don't anyone think that those who were instrumental in the nation's rebirth back in the Forties were completely ignorant of this fact. As you all no doubt know, a self-fulfilling prophecy is a prophecy which becomes true merely because it's widely known, so people of influece will consciously or unconsciously steer events in such a way as to satisfy its requirements.
And I've heard the claim that the Bible predicted the Holocaust. Well, much like the works of Nostradamus, the Bible has become a very abused piece of putty in the hands of innumerable zealots and "scholars" who can quite cleverly make the gospel say and do anything they wish it to. Like numerology and astrology, it's become an intricate pseudoscience involving smoke and mirrors and obfuscating translations and misrepresentations. Indeed, the Bible is huge, and makes thousands of predictions. You sift and dig long and hard enough, you can come up with scads of foretelling little tidbits which, using a big enough sledgehammer of faith and performing the right combination of mixing and matching, can cobble together for you a roughly assembled sort of "jigsaw puzzle" which seems to fairly well fit the facts as recorded by history over the past two thousand years and more. I'll go further: if a book makes enough predictions in its pages, then it's statistically almost unavoidable that a few hundred will turn out to be true. Further still: the more vaguely the predictions are made (speaking in general terms without nailing down specifics), then the more "true prophecies" will be managed to be manufactured by the believers who read between the lines with their wands and spells. Or how about if I put it this way: if a book makes just ONE prediction, then the longer you wait around (centuries, millennia, eons), the greater your chances that some geopolitical scenario will arise which will seem to confirm the prophecy.
It's not my intention to piss anyone off here, but quite frankly just about any pseudoscience or occult superstition you look at these days has behind it a vast body of "incontrovertible facts" and "supporting data" which seems to make it an authentic field of investigation. Most all of it originates from one source: an abuse, misunderstanding, or misrepresentation of statistical probabilities.
What I wouldn't dispute is that the Bible is at least in great part a historical text which recounts the history of Israel and the surrounding region. However it has no track-record of "fulfilled prophecies" which might confirm that it is the word of a hypothetical God. Naturally Israel is an important part of the world, and has been for a long time. However, in modern times this importance has become a never-ending cycle which feeds off itself. Follow the chronology:
1) Long Ago: Important stuff happened in Israel.
2) A Little Later: This important stuff was reported in the Bible and tied in with a religion and its God. (Note: herein is the "Leap Of Faith" on the part of mortal man).
3) Later Still: The Bible spreads everywhere as Christianity's definitive "gospel truth", and in the Bible it is proclaimed that Israel is the Holy Land. People believe this wholeheartedly (another LOF). It so happens Israel contains Jerusalem, a city held holy by Jews and Muslims as well.
4) Present Day: Jews, Muslims, and Christians fight over who gets possession of the Holy Land, a fight which never would have happened had the bibles of the various religions never proclaimed the land to be holy.
In effect, by declaring that "This land is holy and shall influence the course of history for millennia to come", the various religions made a prophecy which couldn't help but fulfill itself. All adherents to the various religions would at the very least attach an exaggerated degree of importance to the land in question, and at the very most would go to war to conquer the land. Since the U.S. and Europe consist of nations with a Judeo-Christian tradition, their populations are inevitably going to take an unhealthy interest in the goings-on in Israel and by extension get their governments and military involved.
One spark, way back, which predicted the fire; and lo, the fire is born. Yeah—that's prophecy!
The Inevitability of Partial Prophecy Fulfillment
Pick a pseudoscience: numerology, astrology, U.F.O. abductions, telekinesis, power crystals, or whatever. Each has its adherents who swear there is circumstantial and/or direct proof to back up their foolery; each has its sacred "body of unimpeachable evidence". Creationism is another, though it stands out by being connected with a major world religion. There are even "creation scientists" who go around trying to disprove evolution as part of an agenda to shore up the Biblical account of creation. They all believe in their dogma and their "evidence" as much as you believe in yours. Most of this is founded on a comprehensive ignorance of science and, more fundamentally, probability and statistics. A document as vast as the Bible, so subtlely metaphorical, and oftentimes ambiguous or downright vague—why, you squint your eyes at the ebb and flow of human history with all its myriad people, places, and events through such a subjective lens as this, and you know what? The real miracle would indeed be if there weren't remarkable parallels and apparent "fulfillments" of prophecies.
Forsooth, beyond objective counterarguments to the significance of prophecy "fulfillment" such as probability theory, we have pertinent considerations of human psychology and its concomitant body of scientific literature documenting experiments which clearly show that people's minds are infinitely pliable and capable of seeing whatsoever they wish to see. Studies continue to be done which demonstrate this beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt. From any random distribution of dots or chaotic swirlings humans can perceive order and patterning. Heard of the Rohrschach test, in which subjects are presented with randomly created ink blots? This is revelant because "biblical interpretation" is indisputably extremely subjective, only instead of dots or ink blots we have even trickier things: words. Consider the Bible and all that it says as being naught but an "ink blot" superimposed against the backdrop of a historical continuum constituting several thousand years of human existence. Believe it or not, breathtaking "patterns" and "correlations" will invariably emerge. Many things between the two will "match up". Then again, history is mind-bogglingly intricate and encompasses a staggering breadth and depth of events, personalities, empires, victories, defeats, microtrends, macrotrends, and countless other factors and dynamics which literally could fill whole libraries with written accounts. You don't think than among a pool of material so vast there wouldn't be at least something which would seem to gibe with what the Bible says? Again, the real "miracle" would be if nothing gibed. A sense of perspective is needed to appreciate this—specifically at least a conceptual (if not mathematical) knowledge of empirical probability theory and the Law of Large Numbers. Faith is fine, but one must gather all the knowledge one can possibly grasp hold of before formulating any educated hypotheses touching on the nature of reality and whether or not it calls for the existence of a God. I don't know everything, and certainly my Weltanschauung contains a dimension of "faith" as well, but my views on the Unknown are more solidly based on the Known than the typical person's is (I believe).
Never blindly "join the crowd"! Always question the "way things are"! Never be afraid to "change your mind"! Be honest with your own intellect, and use all the analytical and introspective faculties at your disposal to investigate, verify, formulate hypotheses, and then amend those hypotheses! That is the means to a scientific socialism as well as a mind in harmony with both nature and its fellow man! No dogma is sacrosanct beyond question, and that includes the Christian Bible as well as all other bibles!
End.
Englishman.