Godless Dave

What is your basis for believing that?

Demigawd

Concerning Gog and Magog

More concerning Gog and Magog

Even more concerning Gog and Magog

WinAce

Magus, I'll level with you.

1. Is the Bible a large book containing hundreds, if not thousands, of diatribes against cities and places?
2. Are recorded history and modern politics both rich fields, such that numerous events will bear superficial similarity to those written down in the Bible (or any other thick book)?
3. If the Bible was completely devoid of paranormal inspiration, and was but the product of human hands, could its followers exploit the above two factors to invent numerous 'prophecies' to use in apologetics?

Here are some more questions, just for personal review. Not that I'm trying to deconvert you or anything ( ), just trying to make you see these things from the perspective of a reasonable nonbeliever.

1. Imagine yourself as an Israelite living at the same time as Isaiah's author. From reading his prophecy, with no knowledge of future events or that it would require millenia to fulfill, can you honestly say there are indications it refers to the far future?
2. If you make a prophecy that a particular city will be destroyed, and don't leave a time limit on its occurence, just how impressive is your prediction? Just how many cities haven't been destroyed over the course of history?
3. Given the number of diatribes and doom predictions in the Bible for pretty much every city in the Middle East, would there ever be a time when there weren't 'impending signs' of the apocalypse here or there?
4. Can you honestly say that prophecies that are guaranteed to occur sooner or later, regardless of whether they were inspired or made up by charlatans, such as the destruction of cities, are remotely convincing as evidence of a god?
5. Did you know Damascus was already destroyed in 1400? "In 1260 the city fell to the Mongols under Hulagu Khan, and it was sacked c.1400 by Tamerlane, who took away the swordmakers and armorers." - Source. Therefore, even assuming Isaiah was inspired to write about the future, is there any reason to assume he was writing about 21st century events...?
6. Would you consider the destruction of another city with the name 'Damascus' a fulfillment of the prophecy? If, say, terrorists blew up Damascus, Maryland or Damascus, Pennsylvania, would you be here on the boards arguing that was what the Bible meant all along? How about a city that was a 'symbolic' Damascus? Basically, how many possible events would make the prophecy appear fulfilled, simply due to our excellent pattern-matching and retroactive shoehorning abilities?
7. If Damascus is not destroyed in the next few years, but merely gets invaded or continues merrily along, are you going to abandon end-times Christianity, or merely rationalize away the failure and look for the next fulfillment?

P.S. My offer for a formal debate on Bible prophecy stands. Don't worry, I won't bite... You should, after all, have no trouble showing how the Old Testament prophets predicted events millenia in the future... assuming they did, of course. If they didn't, on the other hand, and 'Bible prophecy' was like the Rorschach ink blot, that would offer a most superb explanation for the difficulty of demonstrating their prophetic ability.

Mr. Neutron

I think that each thread should be treated on its own merits (or lack thereof), regardless of the poster.

That being said, I really think some of you should acquaint yourselves with the ignore feature and stop wasting so much time and energy in the futile exercise of trying to reason with those who spend an inordinate amount of their day chewing their cud.

WinAce

Hello, Magus55? Any reply *at all* to my post immediately above?

mikester

i say let em speak, too. let them give their spiel about xianity and so on, and maybe one day they'll look back and read something they posted which could help them find some sort of clarity.

WinAce

Magus55

Since obviously you won't get off my case...

No not necessarily. A common theme among some prophecy is that it has a double fullfillment ( the first being a hint of whats to come, and the second being the total fullfillment). Once during the prophets life time as a verification that God is telling the truth, and then again completely during the time in the future that it is intended to happen. Several of Jesus' prophecies were only partially fullfiled during His time on Earth. The complete prophecies aren't intended to be fullfilled until the end times.

That may make sense if you are referring to a generic city, but when speaking of the city of Damascus, in Syria, surrounded in the context of the future prophecies regarding Israel, including it becoming a nation again which didn't happen until the middle of the last century, it gets quite specific.

Considering 3000 years ago, the Middle East was nothing like it is today, and Israel wasn't the target that it presently is, i'd conclude it isn't a coincidence to the amount of activity in the middle east surrounding events in Israel.

Well since as far as I know, humans don't possess precognition, yet 3000 years before the events happen, humans just happened to get specific events and the destruction of cities or countries correct; I'd say thats convincing evidence that someone who knew what was gonna happen told those people what to write down. I know atheists think its self-fullfilled prophecy ( a complete and total copout imo), but since the Bible predicted Israel would become a nation again, Jews would return to Israel from around the world ( which was recently in a news article, that Jews are flooding from all over the world back to Israel), and that the nations surrounding Israel would attack, while outnumbering them greatly, yet coincidently enough, were completely defeated, i'd say Prophecy is pretty accurate for being 3000 years old and half these places not even existing back then. The odds of even a few prophecies being correct are astronomical.

Your source says Damascus fell. That in no way means destroyed and turned to rubble ( and in fact is highly unlikely that, that did happen since it came under new rule only a 100 years later). Your source then follows up saying Damascus came under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Since when do ruins need to be ruled? Your source makes it quite apparent that Damascus wasn't destroyed, only conquered. The Bible says Damascus will be turned into ruins. A well place nuclear bomb would most likely turn the city to ruins.

The Bible says Damascus, Syria, not Damascus PA. Its quite specific about what Damascus it is referring to.

Nope, since there is no time table on prophecy, there is no requirement for when Damascus needs to be destroyed. We happen to be focusing on it currently, because Israel is threatening to attack it, which could mean the prophecy is going to be fullfilled soon. It in no way means it has to be fullfilled now though.

WinAce

In your view, does this 'double fulfillment' look like a legitimate paranormal phenomenon, or something invented after the fact to extract apologetic value whenever history repeats itself?

For instance, from current events, I can make the prediction that Iran will be invaded and the government toppled in a few months. If this occurs, not just now, but centuries in the futury as a result of a totally independent event, could my followers legitimately argue that I predicted both?

This sounds questionable. A prophet can demonstrate his prowess by predicting totally different things in his own lifetime, and then unambiguously stating that a specific prophecy refers to the far future.

In the Bible, nowhere does it actually come out and say this, but it seems it's been inferred from the initial apparent failure of some prophecies that they would have successful secondary fulfillment (instead of that they failed, or other explanations).

Unless the prophet specifically writes that his prophecy is intended for the far future, what real reason do we have for assuming it, especially if it makes sense as a reference to contemporary events?

But doesn't this beg the question of how one can distinguish a failed prophecy from one that's merely yet to be fulfilled? Which methodology do you use for those, BTW?

And doesn't that, in turn, make the value of any 'partially fulfilled' prophecy worthless as an apologetic, as anyone uninspired could make such a thing, and then claim any purported failures were simply to occur in the (conveniently unspecified) future?

For example, suppose my Iran prophecy, on its most obvious reading, falls thru the floor. Perhaps the details don't mesh up, and Israel, not the US, invades. Perhaps the invasion is repelled at the last moment. Whatever the case, I said "The US would invade and conquer Iran", obviously referring to contemporary events, and it didn't.

Would you accept, without independent evidence such as a prior statement in my writings, the rationalization that the US would re-invade Iran and 'completely fulfill' the prophecy at an unspecified future date? If not, aren't you using a double standard for the Bible?

Israel did become a nation 'again' when the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon 600 years or so before Jeuss, which was the contemporary event scholarship tells us the prophets were referring to. From a review of the rest of the book of Isaiah, it seems rather unambiguous, with the references to the King of Babylon and such, that contemporary events and not some esoteric future timeline were being referred to.

Additionally, the association between Israel's restoration and the diatribe against Damascus seems strained, as they occur in different chapters and appear to be haphazardly mixed together.

The best interpretation would seem to be that Isaiah's author saw an imminent end-times scenario, much like modern prophecy watchers, and when this prediction of doom failed, it conveniently became reinterpreted to occur at a future date, sans textual support.

But around 2500 years ago, Israel did fit the profile described by every one of the prophets, and did so much better than the modern equivalent. You can explain this away as 'yet-to-be fulfilled' aspects of the 'prophecy', but I see no reason to adopt this position in lieu of the more obvious, textually supported one.

Additionally, many nations around the world are unstable and enjoy political enemies. Israel has the unfortunate 'advantage' of being geographically important to three different religions, all of which can be militantly violent, but it's not particularly unique.

About the only thing that makes it unique are the unfulfilled (failed?) prophecies surrounding it, which prompt a massive amount of interest from Christian end-timers. Other countries with greater civil rights abuses, equal or worse terrorism, and less internal stability exist around the world (Uganda or Chechnya, anyone?), yet they're less abstract and easier to ignore than a place associated with Armaggedon in a book believed in by a third of the world.

But did anyone actually get those specific events down, or is that simply the impression you get when you cherry-pick a favorable set of verses while ignoring the larger body of those that lie unfulfilled, were referring to contemporary events and not the future, and have no indication of occuring anytime soon?

Perhaps it would help if you outlined your criteria for determining what verses are prophecies, what verses aren't, and how to tell whether one was fulfilled/failed. Surely, as an avowed student of the subject, you must have some consistent methodology for identifying each of these?

... Or do you just decide what's a prophecy on the basis of whether the statement in the Bible matches something that has occured/might occur in modern times? In that case, you'll have to pardon me for being unimpressed, as an identical modus operandi could create the false impression that Moby Dick successfully predicted future events.

Before you answer the question of what methodology you used to come to your conclusion, your assertions about 'odds' and 'pretty accurate' prophecies ring as hollow as those used by Muslim apologists.

Perhaps you ignored the 'sacking' part? Regardless, here's another, less ambiguous source.

"In 1400, while the Damascus armies were in the south, Tamurlane took advantage of the cities lack of defenses. His Mongol hordes almost completely destroyed the city and killed everyone they could capture." - History of Damascus

Surely you cannot be serious on the second part. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were burnt to the ground, yet after the war, "... through the ceaseless efforts of Hiroshima citizens, the region made an impressive recovery and is now continuing to develop as a center of government, economics, and culture in the Chugoku-Shikoku Region." - History of Hiroshima

Destroyed cities get rebuilt. It happened with Damascus, Philadelphia and Hiroshima, and will no doubt happen to hundreds of others. Damascus in particular, even if nuked, would not likely remain a ruin for long.

Yet couldn't I, with equal effectivness, argue that it's referring to Isaiah's contemporary Damascus, not a hypothetical future version? I agree that the prophecy, taken at face value, is quite specific as to which city it refers to.

Unfortunately, that leads me to conclude that Isaiah made a gaffe in his proph... err, educated guess, since he predicted the destruction of a contemporary city (with current politics, not a bad guess either) that was merely captured instead.

It further leads me to conclude that any attempt to shoehorn his prediction to the political climate of centuries in the future is misguided, as it's guaranteed that any particular city will be turned to ruins eventually, making it a sort of "duh!" prediction like "there will be wars and rumors of wars".

Moreover, you avoided my question. IF Damascus, PA or another similar city was destroyed in a manner superficially resembling a statement in the Bible, would you seriously resist adopting the interpretation that was what the prophet originally meant all along in lieu of the more obvious interpretation? I trust you'll be honest.

Does that strike you as the least bit too convenient, and hence suspicious?

But this poses a set of interesting problems with falsifiability. Specifically, hypothetically, if Isaiah's author was merely another uninspired ancient Hebrew with a delusion of grandeur, how would you ever find this out?

If Isaiah was uninspired, what form would you expect his predictions to take? Specific, detail-laden statements about the distant future like "event X will occur in place Y at time Z", or vague diatribes using reasonable guesses about contemporary events, which when applied to the future have a mess of possible interpretations and use dubious devices like 'double fulfillment' and no time limit?

WinAce

Bumpity.