Welcome to this Sunday’s Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. Today we target: Prophesy and Prediction
- With three weeks of prickly problems under our belts, have we figured out where the pricks are and how to treat ‘em?
- Shall we take a breather and take on a lighter subject like: “The End of the World?”
- In reality, if you are a teeny, (with some still boppers up to 25), isn’t the end of the world almost an every day occurrence with blame squarely on soured relationships and parents?
- For adults, do teen anger and rebellion, and life routinely affirmed as ruined seem precursor-like to the end of microcosmic family world?
- Come on college? Or military? Or anything excepting drugs and pregnancy?
- In truth, are end of the world predictions, often labelled “prophesy,” commonplace over multiple millennia?
- Have purveyors, priests and pastors of various persuasions influenced gullible, often illiterate or non inquiring, populations to quiver and quake before a predicted end of days coming to your neighborhood or planet soon?
- Is the specter of a loving and living God coming to lay waste to most of humanity, quick and dead, revelatory?
- Do the sleazy stories of secular scholars and scientists shouting weather-wolf represent prediction, prophesy, or well paid pandering?
- Have we experienced weather hysteria, not over millennia, but just over the last 50 years (since the vaudevillian Earth Day in 1970)?
- With dramatic, scientific certainty were we warned of coming planetary starvation and freezing to death in a new ice age, but 20 years later it’s culprit, acid rain then global heating and flooding leading to near term extinction?
- Existential excrement?
- Is the real climatic panic that paychecks and government grants may disappear? Not to worry: “Just follow one climate folly by making up another?”
- Have legitimate scientific inquiry and process been bastardized by theories becoming theology and challenge deemed heresy?
- Do end of the world wonks and their existential governmental allies really want power and control over us, we the people?
- Climate theology crapola aside, did Americans fashion a path to oblivion in 1971 and double down in ’73?
- In ’71, was it stupidity or political calculation giving ALL 18 year olds the vote by the rushed though 26th Constitutional amendment (old enough to be drafted to fight old enough to vote argument) and then doing away with the draft in ’73?
- Any chance to save the world by revoking that charter, reinstating the draft or, perhaps, giving the vote only to those who actually see combat duty?
- While we are at it, would changing the voting age to 25 (acknowledged age of maturity) help forestall world ending circumstances?
- Is Eliot’s world ending “whimper” (The Hollow Men) improvident or prophecy?
Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The answers and actions are yours?