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Saturday, August 13, 2011

The Perils of Prophecy

The Sibyll of Delphi - Prophetess


I was quite wrong about the effect of the S&P downgrade. Idiotically wrong, to be precise. Such is life.

However, the wrongness there lead me to look at the other "expectation" that I have, which is that 2013 will be a problem year.
Now for I long time I have wondered why this is rolling around in my head. There is the fact that it is five years after 2008's meltdown, and since 2008 is about eight years following the previous big market downslide... and a few other things thrown into the blender and pureed... I was looking at a reverse Fibonacci series of discomfort. (A Fibonacci series starts with 1,2 and adds the previous two integers to compute the following integer: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,...)
I was looking at intervals   13, 8, 5, the last being 2013.
Neat, but naughty, naughty in the sense that it makes little or no sense, and the fact that there is a reverse Fib series does not mean a thing.
But, given its illusion of mathematical rigor and logic, it is a perfect delusion to obsess about. I could OCD it, just like the Reverend Harold Camping - and so many others through history - had obsessed about the end of times, and ended up calling the game over when it had not even gotten to the seventh inning stretch.

One thing the Reverend Camping did not see is:
(1) if God is all-knowing, God must be able to comprehend the details of the universe, and
(2) this means God must be able to comprehend all the possible outcomes and time-lines, and
(3) by comprehending all time-lines and outcomes, that means God comprehends a certain future state, call it S1, as well as another future state, not-S1, this state of not-S1 being the state where S1 did not come to pass.
(4) Since all states are within God's comprehension, none has a favored status; that is, S1 is not somehow more necessarily going to happen than not-S1.

Therefore, everything is possible. Everything existing thing has free will to wander through the infinite set of possibilities.

In other words, we can aways change the future.
If we could not change the future, Jesus should have known it, reckoned that things weren't worth dieing over, and settled down to his life as a carpenter.
Similarly, the Lord Buddha would have remained in his palace, and Moses would have remained in Egypt, and the Prophet of Islam would have remained a successful merchant.
Joseph Smith might have gone to work the farm with his uncle in Detroit, and then stayed there.

But they did not!
They know the future can be changed.

So must we. There is no burden upon us so great that we must allow the weight of its oppression to keep us from our task.

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