[baudrunner]

Do prophecies exist?

Most certainly prophecies exist. As do premonitions, and the ability to see in our minds what others see in their minds through the process of extra-sensory perception. But why drag the bible into this? You must remember that the bible is a compilation of manuscripts that were written by independent authors over a period spanning about 700 years. The Book of Isaiah was written in two sessions a hundred years apart. It has gone through countless revisions and modifications to suit the whims of religious authorities. There are quite a few versions of it. The Vulgate, for example, is the officially accepted Catholic version, and it includes the Septaugent, a collection of Greek scriptural writings. The King James version is the officially accepted protestant version of the Church of England because it contains only those scriptures found in the Hebrew bible. And so on. What adds to the confusion is that there is a valuable historical record included with those writings, and there is song and poetry. It is a mistake, however, to take the entire compendium as the literal truth.

The ability to write in those early times was so rare that those who did know how to write felt comfortable only with the subject of God and God's ostensible interventions in the affairs of mankind, for writing represented a permanent record, and unless one embraced this comfort zone there was great paranoia in being branded a heretic and a charletan. Besides, and importantly, this great gift of writing was considered to be divine in nature, which is why these writers were as often as not considered to be "prophets", simply because they could write.

Even rarer were the geniuses behind mathematics and science, who recorded comfortably what they wrote of their studies because their work represented fact based on observation and experiment. Most of the early writers were not endowed with such intelligence and did not pursue any of those disciplines. The fear that these authors were avoiding gave rise to the notion that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Better to know a lot before one commits pen to paper.

The existence of monastaries, convents, abbeys, seminaries, nunneries, and similar institutions have served to shelter and isolate a special group of the human population. You see, in some cultures, such as the Islamic culture, it is an abomination to have been born with not clearly identifiable gender characteristics. And it is a fact that 10% of the human population are born so. What to do with them? Suffer the embarassment and admit to being unmarriable? Or even worse the persecution, or even possibly execution, upon the discovery that one is neither male nor female, and therefore probably a tool of the devil? The mysterious goings on behind the walls of those isolated establishments only fostered more respect for the mystique that religious beliefs encouraged.

The bible has only ever been a device, unfortunately only used by many to support the institutionalization of certain precepts which are essentially untenable to the rational and intelligent human being. The idea that one's state of being is the result of "God's will" contributes to the delusion that one is called to serve Him by being so extraordinarily endowed, yet we all know that while life is wondrous and amazing, the state of our being is exclusively the result of what it is that makes us what we are, ie. - DNA, and life is not, and never will be perfect.

Religion is a refuge. There is comfort in the belief in that which cannot rationally be, as interpreted by those early egos in their scriptural writings, because myth is pure and purity is non-threatening.

What is behind prophecy, premonition, and ESP?

I will refer the reader once more to the work of Philip Bucksbaum, of Michigan University, who proved to his satisfaction and to that of most of the scientific community that one can store an infinite amount of information on an electron. The information that we are receiving from stars far away can be hundreds of millions of years old, but it is still there for us to witness. A medium which permits the propagation of EM waves is comprised of atoms and molecules on which are stored the information of all time up to the present. Space has the property of being entirely free of friction to the propagation of EM waves, and no energy is lost in the behaviour of the atoms and molecules as they propagate this information, so that it can exist for all time, and continue to propagate until obstructed or absorbed.

A perfect brain can access this information, which consists of modulated EM waves not only in the optical spectrum, but over the entire range from the quantum to the colossal, including the modulations of thought and understanding. But brains are very far from perfect, and where there exists an individual who is especially gifted in understanding and knowing through this phenomenon there is the human element to consider, that the difference between the knowledge received and that recorded is most often vast, representing an interpretion tainted by the human ego, and re-interpreted into wholly unrealistic data.

I do not deny the existence of God, but it is entirely wrong to lean on the bible for perceptions of the truth just because reality sucks.