Fundamentalists (Christians, maybe Muslims too) get carried away by their own imaginations. They think they have figured out the key to Biblical prophecies, and they rush forward convinced of the inerrancy of their own interpretations. How many of you remember Edgar Whisenant’s “88 Reasons Jesus Will Return in 1988”?
I just wanted to publicize this drawing, which appeared in an Adventist book in 1917, entitled, Our Day in the Light of Prophecy. As you can tell from the date, the author was expecting World War I (still at the time called The Great War) would be the final conflict. He was so sure that Imperial Russia and the European Allies would be fighting (on horses) against China. Before the year was out, Imperial Russia was gone.
Fundamentalists predicted that the Iraq War was the beginning of the final conflict. (Perhaps some of them were in the Bush Administration, which originally called the war “Operation Infinite Justice” before they changed it to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”) Being limited to only occasional contact with fundamentalists, I cannot say what they think right now.
The graphic warning is not just to fundamentalists but to any of us who think we can accurately predict the future in all but the most general sense. We have a good scientific understanding of the general course of global warming, but the specific geopolitical consequences are all the more frightening because they are not precisely predictable.
I just wanted to publicize this drawing, which appeared in an Adventist book in 1917, entitled, Our Day in the Light of Prophecy. As you can tell from the date, the author was expecting World War I (still at the time called The Great War) would be the final conflict. He was so sure that Imperial Russia and the European Allies would be fighting (on horses) against China. Before the year was out, Imperial Russia was gone.
Fundamentalists predicted that the Iraq War was the beginning of the final conflict. (Perhaps some of them were in the Bush Administration, which originally called the war “Operation Infinite Justice” before they changed it to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”) Being limited to only occasional contact with fundamentalists, I cannot say what they think right now.
The graphic warning is not just to fundamentalists but to any of us who think we can accurately predict the future in all but the most general sense. We have a good scientific understanding of the general course of global warming, but the specific geopolitical consequences are all the more frightening because they are not precisely predictable.
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